<....What’s particularly fascinating about this domestication is that it comes from some of the very people who would be the first to insist Satan is real, and who would view denying that reality as a dangerous path. I certainly don’t hear church leaders denying the reality of Satan. But I do hear, again and again, them adopting language that so curtails his sphere of influence that it achieves a similar shrinkage.

For example, the topical entry on Satan on the church’s website teaches:

Heavenly Father allows Satan and Satan’s followers to tempt us as part of our experience in mortality. Because Satan “seeketh that all men might be miserable like unto himself,” he and his followers try to lead us away from righteousness. He directs his most strenuous opposition at the most important aspects of Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness. For example, he seeks to discredit the Savior and the priesthood, to cast doubt on the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, to counterfeit revelation, to distract us from the truth, and to contradict individual accountability. He attempts to undermine the family by confusing gender, promoting sexual relations outside of marriage, ridiculing marriage, and discouraging childbearing by married adults who would otherwise raise children in righteousness.

Individuals do not have to give in to Satan’s temptations. Each person has the power to choose good over evil, and the Lord has promised to help all who seek Him through sincere prayer and faithfulness.

In this description, Satan is primarily concerned with disrupting individual happiness and success in the gospel. When he does venture into broader social issues, those issues are — surprise, surprise — the very same ones LDS church leaders are also concerned about in this particular cultural moment, especially nonbinary gender identity and the weakening of social commitments to marriage and childbearing.

What a sad and sorry downfall Satan has had. Let’s all take a moment to extend the guy some sympathy. He’s the one sitting over there at the French café, smoking cigarettes and wrestling with the kind of ennui that it’s now his sole raison d’être to inflict upon you.

Right now, he’s telling the other café patrons and, well, anyone who will listen, that he used to be great.

He could have been a contender.>

<The documentarian Matt Ornstein interviewed two young Latino men in Long Beach, California, at the midpoint of the Trump presidency. They were both strong Donald Trump supporters. Why?

One answered, “Trump’s smart. He knows right from wrong.”

The other one scoffed, “No. No he doesn’t. He’s dumb as s***. But he’s got balls.”

In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost to Trump among male voters by 11 points. In 2020, Joe Biden ran about even with Trump among men. Clinton lost. Biden won.

Now Democrats are preparing again to nominate a woman for president, Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris likes to use the poetic phrase “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” But “what has been” cannot be so easily banished. In the spring and early summer, polls that asked about a Harris-Trump race suggested that Harris would score somewhat worse or about the same as Biden. One poll conducted after the disastrous Biden-Trump debate showed Harris running slightly stronger than Biden. And recent state-by-state polls indicate that Harris could do better than Biden among women, young people, and Black voters.

But polls of hypothetical political matchups may not really tell us very much. In repeated surveys, only about 70 percent of Americans can even name the current vice president. How substantive are their opinions about that person, pro or con? Building out any kind of independent political identity is challenging for a former vice president: Witness the non-presidencies of Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Dan Quayle, and Al Gore—all former veeps who sought and missed the top job. Even canny Richard Nixon lost the race he ran while still serving as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president in 1960.

Kamala Harris might be better for business and M&A than Biden, says Jim Cramer Now the Trump campaign will be defining Harris’s identity too—and no prizes for guessing how they will do that: by casting Harris as a threat to sexual decency and racial order. Earlier this month, Trump posted on Truth Social an advance warning of the campaign he’ll run against Harris:

Also, respects to our potentially new Democrat Challenger, Laffin’ Kamala Harris. She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a “highly talented” politician! Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.

In case you missed Trump’s hint, he’s referencing an old internet smear that Harris slept her way to political success.

The attacks on Harris will operate in a dual universe. In the more obscure and disreputable parts of the right-wing media system, the sexual and racial fantasies will be elaborated. The former Fox News star Megyn Kelly declared Harris’s intimate history “fair game” in a social-media post today. In the more public and more careful parts of the right-wing media system, the fantasies will be referenced and exploited without ever being quite explicitly stated.

In 2012, the Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld quipped: “Obama is now out of the closet … He’s officially gay for class warfare.” The joke was carefully constructed, using the phrase gay for to mean “enthusiastic about.” But the joke worked, as I wrote at the time, because:

A large part of his audience ardently believes that Obama is in fact gay, that his marriage is a sham, and that Mrs. Obama leads a life of Marie Antoinette like extravagance to compensate her for her husband’s neglect while he disports himself with his personal aides.

So it will go with Harris. Her midlife marriage, her mixed-race origins, her manner and appearance, her vocal intonations, her career in the Bay Area with all of its association in the right-wing mind with dirt and depravity—those will be resources to construct a frightening psychosexual profile of the Black, Asian, and female Democratic candidate.

Never in U.S. history has there been a candidate for president who more flagrantly violated Christian ideals of marriage and family than Trump, the thrice-married sexual predator who has boasted on recorded audio of sexually assaulting women and reportedly made lewd remarks about his own daughter. Trump’s supporters can and will block all that out on their way to imagining Harris as sexually debauched.

Images and stereotypes overwhelm reality.

Trump often looked disengaged at his convention last week, including during the speech of his eldest son. However, he clapped and smiled delightedly through the speech by Hulk Hogan, who ripped off his shirt to demonstrate to the audience his fighting zeal for Trump. Hogan is a 70-year-old man who gained fame as an actor in pretend fights that every fan knew to be staged. Yet he’s also an icon of male strength and virility, considered no less awe-inspiring for being fake—maybe more awe-inspiring for being fake....>

<....All working politicians appreciate that the human mind is not fully rational, that voting behavior is impelled by stereotypes, fears, and hatreds. Liberal politics hopes and trusts that the irrationality can be offset by policies and programs: They may hate me, but they will love my $35 insulin. Trump has built his campaigns on the assumption that irrationality rules supreme: They love me, so they will believe me when I falsely claim that it was I who delivered the $35 insulin they love. So far, Trump’s bet has paid off.

To have any hope of countering it, the irrational must be faced and acknowledged. A lot of contemporary progressive politics is based on a faith, or a fantasy, that policing words can reshape reality. For example, call the justice system “the carceral state,” and voters may be persuaded not to mind that elected officials are sending fewer dangerous criminals in prison. Rename residents of urban encampments “the unhoused,” and voters may be led to shrug off tent cities of drug addicts and mentally ill people on streets and in parks. Cordon off measurable political facts with ominous “How dare you say that?” warnings, and the facts will somehow go away.

But facts don’t go away because they go undiscussed. In other competitive endeavors, professionals candidly balance advantages and disadvantages. Other things being equal, success is more likely to follow if a baseball pitcher is taller or if a jockey is lighter. But because other things are rarely equal, some pitchers and some jockeys defy the odds and still win.

Democrats are taking a risk with Harris—and it’s not only their risk. If she does secure the Democratic presidential nomination, then she becomes the only hope to keep Trump out of the White House for a second term. She becomes the only hope for Ukraine, for NATO, for open international trade, for American democracy, for a society founded on the equal worth and dignity of all its people. Anyone committed to those principles and ideals, whatever his or her past or future political affiliation, now has everything riding on the chances of the nominee chosen by some 4,700 Democratic delegates in Chicago next month.

If it is to be Harris, what are her ways to fight the odds and prevail against the irrational urges of tribe and sex so powerfully exploited by Trump?

Three ideas, for now.

The first is to remember that two can play at the game of the irrational. Trump also exists within a vortex of stereotypes and animosities. In March 2019, a Gallup poll found that 56 percent of Americans approved of then-President Trump’s handling of the economy. Yet economic satisfaction did not pay off in a high approval rating; his languished in the low 40s. The CNN polling analyst Harry Enten put his finger on the reason: In a 2019 survey by Quinnipiac, only 39 percent of those polled believed that Trump cared about ordinary Americans, as opposed to 58 percent who thought he did not.

A second idea is to remember that the irrational can be harnessed and redeployed. According to a large body of research, sex stereotypes can help women candidates. The trick, the research suggests, is to persuade voters that the job—say, a seat on the school board—is gender-congruent: for example, that it’s best done by someone who cares a lot about children. This conclusion may be unwelcome to those who want to challenge gender stereotypes rather than benefit from them—but if it works, it works.

A third idea is to trust that reality matters more than Trump wishes it did. The Trump presidency really did end in disaster. His partisans deploy a battery of excuses for why the disaster was not Trump’s fault: the coronavirus pandemic, the George Floyd protests, and so on. But he was the man in charge. The Trump of The Apprentice never accepted excuses. Confronted with candidates who each pinned the blame for failure on others, Apprentice Trump fired them all: “We’ve never had a team lose so badly.” President Trump wants an out for his term that Apprentice Trump would never have accepted from a contestant.

Great presidents have summoned Americans to heed the better angels of their nature, in Lincoln’s famous phrase. But before they became great, those presidents first had to become president—and that meant taking Americans as they are, not as the angels they might be. That same Lincoln again and again deferred to prejudices that he could not in the moment defeat. He even made use of impulses he did not share. As his law partner William Herndon said of him, “He was not impulsive, fanciful, or imaginative; but cold, calm, and precise.” Lincoln took the fewest possible risks; he habitually expressed his boldest ideas in the most conservative language. He had a democracy to save. So do we.>

<Democrats have long believed the best way to beat Donald Trump is to remind Americans was [sic] they turned against the former president in the first place. While she isn't yet his official opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris' mere presence could provoke such a reaction.

Trump has long executed a brutal playbook against his political opponents. He questioned Jeb Bush's energy, Marco Rubio's height, and Ron DeSantis' sincerity (Trump's allies went after DeSantis' eating habits.)

But when Trump deploys the same tactics against women, it often blows up in his face.

In 2015, Trump sparked one the first uproars against him after he said then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever" as he stewed over a debate question about his history of misogynistic comments. Later during the primary, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina notched a breakout moment when asked how Trump insulted her looks.

"Women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said," Fiorina said when asked about Trump insulting her appearance to a Rolling Stone reporter. After seeing an image of Fiorina on TV, Trump said, "Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!"

Years later, Trump deeming former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "a nasty woman" remains a badge of honor for Democrats.

Trump's tendency to follow Roy Cohn's admonition to hit back harder has only exposed him more when a woman confronts him.

In some cases, the exposure came with an actual cost, as columnist E. Jean Carroll can attest after she was awarded nearly $100 million in damages after Trump continued to attack her even after he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.

Most recently, Trump mocked former UN ambassador Nikki Haley's name, labeled his former Cabinet official "a birdbrain," and taunted her husband, Michael, for being absent from the campaign trail despite the fact he was deployed at the time. Haley has since endorsed Trump.

Trump's former foes have turned his attacks into rallying cries, a response that Harris and her allies are likely to use. Even after the 2016 race, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continued to embrace Trump's insult that she was "a nasty woman."

Even some Republicans have called out Trump for crossing the line. More than 40 GOP lawmakers called out President Trump in 2019 when he attacked the four female members of the so-called "squad," saying they should "go back" to where they came from. All four Democrats, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ilhan Omar, were US citizens. Omar was born in Somalia, which she later fled as a refugee and then emigrated to the US.

"I am confident that every Member of Congress is a committed American. @realDonaldTrump's tweets from this weekend were racist and he should apologize," Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, a Republican, wrote on Twitter at the time. "We must work as a country to rise above hate, not enable it."

Democrats have long run up the score with women, though Trump has improved his standing with them somewhat and even narrowed the gender gap in 2020. Before he dropped out, Biden had the smallest lead among women for a Democratic hopeful since 2004, according to The New York Times.

Trump seems far more focused on expanding his advantage with men, something Biden was able to cut into in 2020. The Republican National Convention leaned heavily into testosterone-fueled appeals, including wrestler Hulk Hogan doing one of his signature shirt rips and a keynote address by UFC President Dana White.

Still there were some nods to showing a different side of how Trump treats women. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a convention speech that Trump reassured her when she was the subject of attacks as his White House press secretary.

"Sarah, you're smart, you're beautiful, you're tough, and they attack you because you're good at your job," Sanders [sic] said.>

<On Sunday, President Joe Biden officially ended his 2024 presidential campaign and threw his unbridled support behind his vice president, Kamala Harris, to become the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.

Biden’s decision came as less than a shock. After his disastrous debate performance against former President Donald Trump, concerns Biden could not adequately run against the twice-impeached convicted felon found liable for sexual assault hit a fever pitch. Calls from prominent Democrats for Biden to step aside mounted in the following weeks, and for good reason ― three in five Americans believed the president should end his presidential campaign.

But regardless of how inevitable Biden’s decision to withdraw from the November election appeared to be, his choice to pass the proverbial torch was his and his alone, solidifying the 81-year-old as one of the most selfless politicians in recent memory.

It was also a masterclass in politicking, now that Democrats officially face a Republican nominee who continues to run on a so-called “America first” platform that is, in reality, a “Me First” manifesto. The moment Biden hit “send” on that tweet and ended his candidacy, he did what Donald Trump has never done and has consistently proved himself unwilling to do: Put America first.

Unlike the leader of the Republican party, Biden prioritized unity over ambition. It was clear, prior to his historically rare announcement, that Biden did not want to exit the presidential race. “I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump,” Biden wrote in a letter to congressional Democrats on July 8.

Biden then doubled down on his commitment to continue his candidacy, telling ABC News’ George Stephanopoulous in a recent interview that only the “Lord Almighty” could convince him to end his campaign.

But eventually, according to CNN, Biden consulted family members and top advisors, and studied “the data coming in” that showed he faced an unrealistic path to reelection. As a result, Biden reportedly “became convinced he would ‘weigh down’ the ticket” and, as a result, decided to drop out of the race on Saturday before announcing his decision on Sunday.

“I know yesterday’s news was surprising, and it’s hard for you to hear,” Biden said on a call to Harris’ campaign headquarters Monday afternoon. “But it’s the right thing to do…I think we made the right decision.”

Juxtapose that decision with those of Trump ― a man whose average approval rating as president was just 41%. In 2021, 58% of Americans said they did not want Trump to run for reelection in 2024, according to one Quinnipiac poll, and in April, 49% of Americans said that if able they would replace both Biden and Trump on the November presidential ballot.

With Trump as the leader of the Republican party, the GOP has suffered substantial midterm losses, and fallen prey to political infighting that has left Republicans focused on usurping their own House speakers and holding erroneous congressional hearings instead of passing anything even close to resembling meaningful legislation.

Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence ― whom Trump supporters wanted to hang during the Jan. 6 insurrection ― has refused to endorse his former running mate, leaving Trump to pick a running mate in JD Vance who once compared the former president to Hitler.

In fact, 40 out of 44 of Trump’s former cabinet members have refused to endorse him, including former national security advisor John Bolton, former white house chiefs of staff John F. Kelly and Mick Mulvaney, and former attorney general William Barr ― all issuing stark warnings to the American public that their previous boss is “not fit to be president,” and “follows his own personal interests.”

But has Trump listened to his former advisors, the polls or would-be voters? Absolutely not. Instead, he continues his desperate attempt to regain the White House so he can enjoy near-total immunity from criminal prosecution ― courtesy of the Supreme Court ― and successfully stall, or even kill, his remaining legal cases.

<....As Trump revels in the MAGA cult of personality that has infected every corner of the Republican party, Biden has reminded the country that a political party is not one person, and one person is not an entire political party.

As a result, the Democratic party is arguably more united and invigorated than it has been in months (if not years), while the Republican party and Trump’s candidacy is in complete disarray. It is clear that Trump World never, for a second, seriously considered the possibility that Biden would step side ― the mere concept of a politician putting party, country and the fate of our nation’s democracy above oneself is, to so-called freedom-loving Republicans, as foreign a concept as bodily autonomy, religious pluralism or no-fault divorce.

“MAGA seems completely flummoxed by Biden’s withdrawal and quick coalescence around Harris,” Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist, wrote on Threads. “But this scenario has been plausible for weeks. What I think is that politicians doing what’s right, rather than acting out of fear and ambition, isn’t part of the MAGA mental universe.”

So while Republicans pitch a public fit ― claiming Trump should be “reimbursed for fraud” after spending money on a campaign against Biden and threatening legal action to keep Harris off the November ballot ― Harris has raised a record-breaking $81 million since Biden exited the election. Of the 888,000 individual donors, 60% made their first contribution to a presidential campaign ― an estimated 532,800 Americans who, for the first time this year, have thrown their hard-earned dollars behind a singular candidate. More than 28,000 people have signed up to volunteer for Harris’ campaign, many in key battleground states, and Charli XCX has officially declared “Kamala is brat.”

In just 24 hours, the vice president has successfully positioned herself as the capable prosecutor versus the convicted felon; the younger, mentally sound adult versus the 78-year-old senior citizen prone to violent insurrections and nonsensical speech; the future of the country versus the embodiment of its most misogynistic, racist past. That, Trump, is what you call “winning.”

In France and the U.K., progressive parties successfully united to beat back dangerous right-wing parties. For the good of their countries, liberal politicians set aside their political differences. It wasn’t necessarily about who carried the mantle, so long as the parties hellbent on dismantling democracy were kept far away from the proverbial torch.

By withdrawing from the presidential race, Biden did the same ― he put aside his personal or political aspirations, admitted he is not the sole savior of American democracy, and united the party in the ongoing “battle for the soul of the nation.”

That, Republicans, is putting America first. If it feels weird or even unfair, it’s because your candidate has never, not once, done the same.>

<There must be something about life tenure that makes it nearly impossible for federal judges to take responsibility for faults in their financial disclosures. The leading example is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who once claimed he had “inadvertently” failed to disclose 20 years of his wife’s employment.

Perhaps inevitably, the resort to implausible excuses and obfuscations appears to have filtered down to the trial courts.

Federal judges are required by law to report their own and their spouse’s financial holdings every year, and are legally and ethically bound to keep themselves informed of their “financial interests and make a reasonable effort to keep informed about the personal financial interests of the judge’s spouse.”

Recusal is mandatory if the judge or spouse holds a financial interest, “however small,” in a party to the proceeding.

The system doesn’t always work.

In 2021, reporters for the Wall Street Journal conducted an extensive review of disclosure statements and court dockets, which identified 152 federal judges who failed to recuse themselves from a total of 1,076 cases in which they or their family owned stock.

One case involved Judge Lewis Liman, of the Southern District of New York, who presided over a multi-billion dollar antitrust case even though his wife held stock in Bank of America, the lead defendant.

In Litovich v. Bank of America, et al, filed in April 2020, several investor groups sued over a dozen investment banks, claiming they had conspired to fix certain bond pricing. Liman presided for 18 months without recusing himself.

On Oct. 25, 2021, he ruled in favor of Bank of America and the other defendants, dismissing the case in its entirety, without ever advising the parties of the stock holding. Liman’s eventual disclosure of the financial conflict, coming months after he dismissed the case, was patently inaccurate.

In February 2022, while the case was on appeal, the Wall Street Journal asked Liman about his non-recusal in 13 cases, including Litovich. Shortly afterward, Liman directed the clerk of court “to file notices to parties in those cases saying he should have disqualified himself.”

The letter to the Litovich parties, dated Feb. 25, 2022, said that it had been “brought to his attention” that his wife owned stock in Bank of America “that neither affected nor impacted his decisions in this case [but] would have required recusal.” The letter invoked an ethics advisory opinion providing “guidance for addressing disqualification that is not discovered until after a judge has participated in a case.”

Liman’s letter was at best misleading. The specific wording — it had “come to his attention” and “disqualification that is not discovered” — implied that he had no knowledge of his wife’s Bank of America stock until after he dismissed the Litovich case.

That is not so.

On May 29, 2021, Liman filed his disclosure report for 2020 — certified by him as “accurate, true and complete” — clearly listing the Bank of America stock. Thus, Liman had actual knowledge of the Bank of America investment at least five months before he dismissed the claims against all defendants, and nine months before he disclosed the stock holding to the parties....>

<....Liman’s evasive letter imposed much-wasted effort on the litigants and appellate judges, who had to proceed on the erroneous assumption that he had “no knowledge of the conflict until after it was reported by The Wall Street Journal, which occurred after Judge Liman issued his decision granting the motion to dismiss.”

Several pages of the court’s opinion, and many more pages of the parties’ briefs, were devoted to an issue that would have been unnecessary if Liman had been forthcoming.

Although the undisclosed investment was under $15,000, the appellate court held that Liman’s financial conflict required reversal under the mandatory “however small” rule of disqualification. The case was sent back to the trial court, and assigned to a new judge who will have to start from the beginning.

Liman also sent a second letter to the parties, informing them that his wife had “fully divested” the Bank of America stock several months before the dismissal. The appellate court considered this irrelevant.

I sent Liman an email requesting an explanation of the discrepancy between his letter and financial report. I received only a curt reply from an administrator, stating that the court declined to comment “on any matters before it.”

That is a bogus excuse. The Litovich case has not been before Liman for over two years, having been transferred to another judge due to his financial conflict. Moreover, the Code of Conduct for United States Judges specifically allows judges to issue “explanations of court procedures.”

Also, Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito have made public statements explaining financial disclosure or disqualification procedures.

Liman’s nondisclosure had serious repercussions in a single case. More significantly, it is emblematic of the casual attitude toward disclosure and recusal that is found too often in the judiciary, as the Wall Street Journal reported, from top to bottom.

I don’t doubt that Liman is a good person and a good judge. Everyone makes mistakes. It would be easy to believe that he sincerely forgot or overlooked the Bank of America investment, although that would require him to admit fault and apologize.

Instead, he invented an absolving story of belated discovery, which failed the test of candor. The public deserves better.>

<The Trump campaign and Republicans face a new challenge with President Biden’s exit from the 2024 race: How to attack a female opponent without alienating voters.

It’s not new terrain for Trump, who defeated then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 campaign.

But appealing to suburban women and independent voters in particular has long been a challenge for the former president, who has been found liable for sexual abuse, has taken credit for ending Roe v. Wade, and has regularly hurled insults at his female opponents.

Already the campaign against Harris is proving to be somewhat of a minefield for Republicans, who have mocked her likely elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket as a diversity hire.

This has led to a backlash, with Democrats and media personalities describing the argument as idiotic and racist.

Trump himself has ridiculed Harris over her laugh and called her “Dumb as a Rock” on social media.

Other Republicans have signaled some discomfort with these lines of attack.

“I am very clear and very consistent about this and talked to the members about this this morning. This is an election about competing policies. It’s not about personalities,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told CNN on Tuesday.

“We do very well comparing the records of Kamala Harris and the Biden-Harris administration and the Trump administration,” he added. “And I think if we do that we will have an extraordinary November.”

Trump has thus far attacked Harris on both policy and personality. He has taken to mocking her with the nickname “Laffin’ Kamala” at rallies and has branded her “Lyin’ Kamala” in recent social media posts. Trump told the New York Post on Monday he would describe Harris as “vicious and dumb.”

He has also blamed Harris for the surge in migration at the southern border, calling her the “border czar” in reference to her work addressing the root causes of migration from the Northern Triangle region.>

<It might seem weird to say something that a lot of people agree with and still get blasted with social media snark, but that’s what happened to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Monday.

Like politicians on both sides of the aisle, the Georgia lawmaker called on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to resign in the aftermath of the July 13 assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

Greene is one of 12 Republicans and three Democrats who suggested they wanted Cheatle to step down during her House Oversight Committee hearing. The list includes Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).

However, Greene’s particular demand became the subject of many snarky remarks ― all because of her choice of words on social media.

“I’ve never seen a more incompetent woman in my life,” the lawmaker wrote, before launching into a full-on conspiracy theory.

Given Greene’s notoriety for spreading other conspiracy theories, starting fights in Oversight Committee hearings and botching basic facts, perhaps it’s no surprise that many people keyed in on her use of the word “incompetent.”>

One thing sure: the worthless cow wrote the book on incompetence.

<Rep. Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) – one of former President Donald Trump's biggest acolytes in Congress — reportedly claimed $12,000 in reimbursements relating to her $1.6 million Capitol Hill town house that she rented out online.

According to photos obtained by the Daily Mail, Mace posted her luxurious DC home on the vacation rental site Vrbo, advertising it as "perfectly situated a block from the Capitol" and "perfect for short events where proximity to the [C]apitol is ideal." The advertisement referred to the home as "the DuPont house," complete with three bedrooms that have a king size bed, a queen size bed and a bedroom with two twin-size beds.

"Built in 1905, this is a traditional Capitol Hill 3- story rowhouse," the posting read, advertising its 2,400 square feet of living space. "Use of the all brick outdoor patio, kitchen and main level are available for quick events for 10-24 guests."

The New Republic reported that Mace took advantage of a new Congressional expense program that doesn't require receipts to claim reimbursements in excess of $12,000. The program is meant to help members get some relief from the costs they incur from having to simultaneously maintain two households — one in their home districts, and one in Washington, DC, which is one of the most expensive cities in the U.S.

However, the program isn't supposed to reimburse mortgage principal or interest costs, but only the costs of maintaining a house, like insurance and property taxes. Members can claim up to $34,000 in food and lodging reimbursements each year, meaning Mace's $12,000 is within that limit. But that didn't stop the House Ethics Committee from opening an official inquiry into the South Carolina Republican, as the New York Times recently reported.

"Representative Mace has violated House Ethics Rules by repeatedly seeking reimbursement for lodging in excess of the actual monthly expense of maintaining her co-owned townhouse in Washington, D.C., resulting in a misuse of taxpayer funds for purposes unrelated to her official duties," read a complaint submitted to the ethics committee.

Mace has blamed her staff for the error, which is unlikely to ease tensions within the far-right congresswoman's office. In late 2023, she lost virtually all of her senior staff, who accused her of fostering a "toxic work environment."

In January, her former chief of staff — who reportedly left with the office's popcorn machine — announced he was running against her in the Republican primary race for her district that will be decided tonight.

Mace reportedly made staff uncomfortable by discussing her sex life around her subordinates. One former staffer told the New York Post that she "frequently made sexual references in the office and discussed things that were not appropriate in a work environment.">

<Book banning is now out of control. Across the nation, zealots bombard public school boards and city councils with vicious demands to ban particular books from libraries. The nonprofit literary organization Pen America published the latest April 2024 results from its ongoing study that tracks the nation’s book bans. In early 2023, Texas led the nation in school book bans, followed closely by Florida.

Across the country, 4,349 book bans in 23 states were recorded during the 2023 fall semester, with more school bans during the first six months of the 2023–24 school year than in 2022–23. Four Texas districts notched the most book bans. The Frisco ISD banned 368 books, followed by the Keller ISD with 85, the Conroe ISD with 79 and the Texarkana ISD with 58.

The selection of banned books in Texas is varied. The usual suspects include books about race, gender and sexuality, with some surprising titles. “Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays” by acclaimed astronomer Stephen Hawking got the boot in one North Texas district, while even the Bible was ousted in another. Titles from the “Lord of the Rings” series by J.R.R. Tolkien were banned, as were books by Margaret Atwood, including “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Those who want to ban books use obscenity law and inflamed rhetoric about “porn in schools” to justify banning books about sexual violence and LGBTQ+ topics, especially transgender identities. Their efforts disproportionately targeted books by women and nonbinary authors. The movement to ban books also focuses on other hot-button themes of race and racism by advancing rhetoric disparaging “critical race theory,” “woke ideology” and the effort to ensure library collections are diverse and inclusive. And, of course, history books that tell the truth about America’s sordid extended support of slavery and our nation’s indigenous population holocaust were banned.

Right-wing extremists frame their ridiculous rant as a way of resisting supposed “liberal indoctrination” and spew conspiracy theories about “sexual grooming.” In their baseless accusations, “grooming” refers not only to pedophilia but also to LGBTQ+ teachers and librarians who are falsely accused of “indoctrinating” children into an LGBTQ+ “lifestyle.” This is classic homophobia.

Books that make you uncomfortable are the books that make you think. This is what a school is supposed to do — Make you think! Alas, not in Texas. The movement to ban books is profoundly undemocratic and is usually based on excerpts taken out of context. This effort seeks to impose restrictions on all students and families based on the preferences of a few. There is a big difference between not liking a book for whatever reason, preventing your child from reading it and energetically working to prevent anyone else from reading it because you don’t like it.

Lynette Mejia, executive director of Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship, says, “This continues to be a long, exhausting fight for those of us on the front lines, but as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the arc of the moral universe does bend toward justice, and we won’t stop until libraries are once again protected from these assaults.”

Amandeep Kochar, president and CEO of publisher Baker & Taylor, says, “We must advocate for access and the free exchange of ideas. To hinder access to the freedom of the mind is among the gravest injustices we could commit against the future. Real stories and imagination captured in books are how we cultivate the wisdom and understanding to build a more conscious, caring world.”

If diverse stories are suppressed, how can we expect children and young adults to cultivate the empathy and understanding necessary to reject ignorance and embrace our shared humanity?>

<Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and several of her colleagues unveiled a new bill Tuesday looking to restore powers of the administrative state after the Supreme Court scaled back unelected bureaucrats’ powers in June.

Warren — along with fellow Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Edward Markey of Massachusetts and independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who typically caucuses with Democrats — rolled out the Stop Corporate Capture Act on Tuesday, which would essentially overturn the Supreme Court’s landmark June decision ending Chevron deference. Formerly a key tool for federal bureaucrats to make and enforce regulations, Chevron deference held that courts should defer to executive agencies’ interpretations of statutory ambiguities in laws pertaining to a given regulatory action.

The Supreme Court’s June 28 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo explicitly rejected Chevron deference, a move that many environmental and progressive activists largely decried and which many free-market and conservative voices praised as an important step toward reining in bureaucratic excess. Warren’s bill would codify Chevron deference into law and also make other changes to the federal rulemaking process, such as streamlining the comment period and requiring public commenters to disclose any industry-funded research or possible conflicts of interest.

“Giant corporations are using far-right, unelected judges to hijack our government and undermine the will of Congress,” Warren said of the bill. “The Stop Corporate Capture Act will bring transparency and efficiency to the federal rulemaking process, and most importantly, will make sure corporate interest groups can’t substitute their preferences for the judgment of Congress and the expert agencies.”

Democratic Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal has also already introduced a similar measure in the House.

The Supreme Court’s opinion could mean that some of the Biden administration’s flagship environmental policies, such as its tailpipe emissions standards for light- and medium-duty vehicles that have been termed an electric vehicle mandate by critics, could be adversely affected, several energy policy experts with experience in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the Daily Caller News Foundation on the day the decision came down.>

<Former President Donald Trump’s campaign team apparently believes we are experiencing a vibe shift.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Trump campaign sent out a memo from their pollster Tony Fabrizio. The memo, which was blasted out to the campaign’s entire press list, was labeled “CONFIDENTIAL” and featured Fabrizio lowering expectations now that President Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid and Vice President Kamala Harris is the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee in the race against Trump.

“Many of you have heard me refer to the upcoming ‘Harris Honeymoon’ that I expect to see in the public polling over the next couple of weeks. As I’ve explained, the honeymoon will be a manifestation of the wall-to-wall coverage Harris receives from the [mainstream media]. The coverage will be largely positive and will certainly energize Democrats and some other parts of their coalition at least in the short term,” Fabrizio wrote. “That means we will start to see public polling – particularly national public polls – where Harris is gaining on or even leading President Trump.”

The switch from Biden to Harris came after Trump was riding high in the polls in the wake of the attempt on his life and the Republican National Convention. Since Sunday, when Biden announced his decision to abandon his re-election, Harris boxed out any potential challengers for the nomination and brought in a historic fundraising haul of over $100 million.

That early momentum for Harris apparently prompted a bit of expectation setting from Trump’s team. Fabrizio said Harris will get a “bump” in the polls due to initial coverage, her running mate choice — which will likely come ahead of the Democratic National Convention virtual roll call vote due to take place next month — and the in-person convention, which is due to start Aug. 19.

The Harris campaign did not respond to a request for comment about Fabrizio’s memo.

While Fabrizio predicted short term gains for Harris, he suggested her numbers will ultimately take a hit.

‘Before long, Harris’ ‘honeymoon’ will end and voters will refocus on her role as Biden’s partner and co-pilot. As importantly, voters will also learn about Harris’ dangerously liberal record before becoming Biden’s partner,” Fabrizio wrote.

Fabrizio went on to blame Harris for “creating historic inflation,” supposedly due to her deciding vote on Biden’s infrastructure package, and for enabling “migrant crime” in her role as “Biden’s Border Czar” and in her earlier career as a district attorney in San Francisco.

Fabrizio’s scattershot blitz is evidence of a kitchen sink approach Trump’s team has used against Harris. In the three days since the Democrats’ ticket switch, Trump aides and allies have trotted out a variety of attacks on Harris including factually questionable attempts to paint her as a far left radical, complaints about the nature of Biden’s departure, multiple paranoid conspiracy theories from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), sadly predictable misogyny and racism, and something about plastic straws. For his part, Trump seems to have switched from dubbing Harris “Laffin’ Kamala” to calling her “Lyin’ Kamala”, which, as a re-tread of the nickname he memorably gave Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) during the 2016 GOP presidential primary, hardly seems like his most inspired work on that front.

One Republican operative who requested anonymity to discuss their party’s candidate, suggested the lack of a more focused attack on Harris indicates Trump’s own polling honeymoon may have left him distracted.

“It felt like the Trump campaign was already measuring the drapes and picking out West Wing office space instead of preparing for the very real possibility that Biden would drop out,” the Republican operative said, adding, “Time will tell as to whether this lack of outward preparation hurts Trump moving forward, but overconfidence like this is exactly why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016.”>

<President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 race for the White House may have been a shock, but it should not have come as a surprise. For weeks, Democrats openly panicked about a landslide loss in November if the party kept an 81-year-old at the top of the ticket.

Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, sat back and watched the damaging spectacle unfold. What they did not do is plan for it to end.

As The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta reported earlier this month, Republican operatives were convinced that Trump had fatally wounded Biden’s campaign at their June 27 debate. But they also thought — and hoped and prayed — that Biden would stubbornly refuse to accept the political reality, hold on to the Democratic nomination and lead his party to disaster. What Republicans did not do is any real planning for an alternative. Trump chose a running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, who appeals more to hard-right ideologues and donors like Peter Thiel than female swing voters in the suburbs; it was a pick that reflected confidence, if not hubris. Then, at the Republican National Convention last week, the GOP spent days going on about how their opponent was old, frail and weak, all but ignoring the 59-year-old vice president, former prosecutor and heir apparent, Kamala Harris.

“When convention speakers reached out to the GOP nominee’s campaign, gauging whether to hedge their speeches with attacks on Harris,” Alberta noted in an update this week, “they were told to keep the focus on Biden.”

That the Trump campaign and its media affiliates were inexplicably blindsided is apparent in their insta-response to Harris’ ascendance. Opposition research from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, provided to reporters on Monday, includes bullet points that try to paint Harris as “weird,” the evidence including that she laughs at “inappropriate” times and likes Venn diagrams.

There are the usual lines of attack — conflating Harris’ diplomacy in Central America with her being a “border czar” — but it’s largely a cut-and-paste job.

It’s not that the NRSC isn’t bringing it’s [sic] best, but that this is the best the GOP can do. Republicans can also do much worse.

“One hundred percent, she was a DEI hire,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said Monday, claiming the former San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, and U.S. senator lacked the qualifications to even be a vice president (Vance, by contrast, has written one (1) book and been a senator for less than two years). Biden, he said, only picked Harris because she is of Black and Indian heritage.

“What about — what about white females?” Burchett asked, normally and not sounding a little suspect and actually kind of weird.

Playing to white racial anxiety, using the preferred euphemism of the day (DEI standing for diversity, equality and inclusion, now used as a stand-in for “affirmative action” and far worse), is not Republicans’ only play. There is also that old favorite, misogyny; combine it with racist dog whistles and you have your new 2024 talking points.

Matt Walsh, a self-styled "fascist" who watches Disney cartoons and gets offended for a living, asserted that Harris had only got to where she is by sleeping with powerful men and “begging for hand outs.”

Megyn Kelly, a former cable news personality who was fired by NBC for defending white racists donning “blackface,” likewise ignored Harris winning multiple contested elections in the country’s most powerful state and declared that the sitting vice president was an “unqualified political aspirant” who had chosen to “sleep her way into and upwards in California politics.”

On Fox News, Trump surrogate Kellyanne Conway managed to avoid calling Harris “colored” — what passes for a win in MAGA circles, and a test failed by former Trump advisor Seb Gorka — but her attacks were only marginally more subtle. Harris, Conway said, “doesn’t work hard” and “she does not speak well" (Trump appears to believe differently and is trying to back out of his scheduled debate with her).

Speaking Tuesday, former Republican lawmaker Joe Scarborough lamented his old party’s decline, arguing that the “DEI” and related attacks make the GOP looks like “total idiots,” alienating voters who are less online and steeped in far-right grievances. They might not completely understand what Republicans are going on about, but “they know it is probably racist.”

Since Harris locked up the Democratic nomination, the question for Republicans has been: "Can you be normal about a woman of color?" The answer so far is a resounding “afraid not.”>

<Vice President Kamala Harris late Monday garnered the backing of enough Democratic delegates to win the party's nomination and face off against GOP nominee Donald Trump, an Associated Press survey found. But while the former California prosecutor has enjoyed surprisingly smooth sailing since she announced her candidacy Sunday, experts predict things can soon get tricky as the race heats up.

Several state delegations convened Monday night to affirm their support for the vice president, including those in Texas and California. By the end of the night, Harris had the backing of well over the 1,976 delegates she would need to clinch the nomination, coming in at just under 2,700 delegates, according to the AP tally. Still, delegates are not bound to cast their vote for Harris at the virtual roll call ahead of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month, which party officials said will occur between Aug. 1 and Aug. 7, according to The New York Times.

“When I announced my campaign for president, I said I intended to go out and earn this nomination,” Harris said in a statement posted to X Monday. “Tonight, I am proud to have secured the broad support needed to become our party’s nominee.” She added, “I look forward to formally accepting the nomination soon.”

The development capped off an explosive first 24 hours for Harris' newly minted presidential campaign that saw her set a new presidential fundraising record and add nearly 29,000 volunteers to her campaign following President Joe Biden's decision to bow out of the race. The pledged support also punted concerns that resistance among diehard Biden delegates would derail her nomination bid.

"There had been concerns initially that there might be the equivalent of a very short Democratic primary, and there were concerns that, because she didn't do well in the primary in 2020, that this could lead to a problem to her this turn around," said Jennifer Lawless, the University of Virginia's political science department chair. "But that's no longer the case. She now faces an electoral landscape that is pretty much the same as whatever electoral landscape Joe Biden was going to face."

But experts also say the road ahead to the November presidential contest presents Harris with several greater challenges that even enthusiastic Democratic support can't upend — chief among them her lack of a defined public image and Republican attacks — especially on an abbreviated timeline.

Kevin McMahon, a professor of political science at Trinity College, predicted that race and gender, by way of the racialized and gendered attacks conservatives have flung at Harris — a concern made more pronounced given she's likely to face off against an opponent "who's obviously very open to using racialized attacks or gendered attacks" — will become a key focus of the race that she would have to overcome.

Republicans had begun leaning into racist and sexist attacks against Harris even before Biden exited the race and endorsed her, labelling Harris a "DEI hire," an allegation that she only attained her position because she benefitted from privileging policies and practices. In the aftermath of Biden's withdrawal, those GOP insults have continued and expanded to include mounting misogynistic claims that she slept her way into political power.

GOP opposition has also arisen through threats to legally challenge the replacement of Biden on the Democratic ticket, with the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, allocating millions of dollars to support such legal battles. However those potential lawsuits, legal experts told Salon Monday, stand little chance of amounting to anything in court should they even get there.

"Republicans have made it clear that they want to suggest that [Harris is] an illegitimate nominee. Although the law and the paperwork are not on their side — the Democrats have not held their convention yet so Biden was not an actual nominee who's being switched out, this is an actual process, there's an election — they're suggesting that this isn't fair and that it's bait and switch," Lawless told Salon, noting that such attacks are "consistent" with the way the GOP "suggested that Barack Obama was not a legitimate nominee because he wasn't qualified, and that he wasn't a U.S. citizen."

That narrative, along with claims that the Democratic Party is eschewing democratic means to select their nominee, is something that Republicans are "going to hammer" the party with and will end up sticking to it "no matter what," according to J. Wesley Leckrone, a professor of political science and the department chair at Widener University.....>

<...."The question is how independents look at this. I think that's the perception because the right and conservatives are going to hammer away that they are the guardians of democracy, and it's really the Democratic elites that forced Biden out of the race and anointed Harris, who was not picked by the party voters," he told Salon.

With just over 100 days until the election, Leckrone added that another challenge Harris likely will have to navigate is in defining herself as a candidate given that she's a "relatively unknown commodity" for many Americans despite being the sitting vice president because of the low-profile position she's taken in the Biden administration over the last three-plus years.

That uncertainty also extends to her and the president's record, which Lawless said they have "not been able to communicate adequately to the American people."

"The economic upturn that the country has experienced is not translating into people's perception, and what we'll see over the course of the next few weeks is whether that was a problem with Joe Biden not being an adequate messenger, or if, even if you communicate that message well, it doesn't resonate," Lawless said, noting that the matter is a "challenge that's going to matter to independent voters."

In developing that public image of her over the next several weeks, Harris will also have to invest time in challenging the perception of her as a "San Francisco liberal who is unable to represent Middle America," an image the vice president has started to address by stopping in key battleground state Wisconsin and having a "vice presidential shortlist" that includes multiple Midwest governors.

Harris, however, also has a number of advantages that her former running mate did not. Her relative youth and energy, Lawless said, appears to have injected a level of enthusiasm into the Democratic base in ways Biden did not while her racial and ethnic identities make it "a lot more difficult for Donald Trump to chip away at the Democrats advantage when it comes to Black male voters," which was a key part of the Republican strategy. "It seems like that strategy is going to fall flat on its face," she said.

On Sunday night, just hours after she announced her nomination, a mass call organizing to get Harris elected and fundraising convened on Zoom with upwards of 40,000 Black women, raising more than $1.6 million. Another call Monday night saw around 53,000 Black men endeavoring to do the same, raising another $1.3 million for Harris' campaign.

The vice president had already inherited Biden's political operation, which includes more than 1,000 staffers and the nearly $96 million in funds available as reported at the end of June. But in the first 24 hours after receiving Biden's endorsement, Harris received another $81 million in donations with contributions, according to her campaign, from more than 888,000 donors. Harris has since gone on to bank more than $100 million in donations.

Endorsements from prominent Democrats, including Govs. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Wes Moore of Maryland, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, also rolled in Monday, adding to the spark in enthusiasm around the vice president's campaign and diminishing the pot of her potential Democratic challengers.

Given those advantages, the question that remains is whether she can "use those qualities to her advantage" and mobilize voters who were questioning if the Democratic Party was the one for them, McMahon said.

For her part, the former California senator has already started to define the central themes of her campaign against Trump, seeking to contrast herself as a former prosecutor and law and order candidate with Trump, who was convicted of 34 felony counts earlier this year and faces two other criminal prosecutions at the state and federal level, while also emphasizing her defense of economic opportunity and abortion rights.

"Donald Trump has demonstrated a very, very hostile relationship toward women of color over time, so in a lot of ways, this is his worst nightmare because he's often not disciplined, and if he engages in sexist and/or racist attacks, I think he's going to face significant backlash," Lawless said.

"What we've seen in 2018, in 2020 and in 2022 is that women don't like it and female voters don't like it when you treat them in a sexist way or try to take away their rights or what they've accomplished and earned," she added. "And I think the Republicans are probably in for a rude awakening.">

<After President Joe Biden announced, on Sunday, July 21, that he was ending his reelection campaign and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, it didn't take long for countless Democrats to rally around her.

Harris now has more than enough to delegates for the nomination, and according to Fortune, her fundraising haul had brought in at least $100 million by Tuesday morning. The vice president is now the presumptive 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, with everyone from Biden to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer rallying around her presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), radio host Erick Erickson and other far-right Republicans have been claiming that replacing Biden with Harris constitutes a "coup."

But veteran conservative columnist and former Nancy Reagan speechwriter Mona Charen, in a blistering article published by The Bulwark on July 23, finds that claim highly audacious coming from supporters of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.

"This is rich," the Never Trump conservative argues. "Here is indeed a candidate in this race who attempted to stage a coup, and we know who that is. Trump submitted his false electoral votes, pressured his vice president, and sent his goons to Capitol Hill because he would not accept the verdict of the voters."

On X, formerly Twitter, Erickson posted, "Y'all can argue over the word coup, but Biden stepping aside is the American equivalent of all those people accidentally falling out of windows in Russia."

Charen writes, "The party that openly admires Vladimir Putin — see Carlson, Tucker — has no business making snarky comments about people falling out of windows. So please sit down and shut up with your coup talk."

The former Reagan White House speechwriter adds, "The response of the GOP to a real attempted coup? After some initial condemnations, nearly the entire party fell into line denying that January 6th had been anything to get excited about and endorsing the coup-plotter for re-election. There were no calls for him to drop out of the race.">

Cotton is so full of shyte, one can hear his arsehole puckering.

<Vice President Kamala Harris framed her likely upcoming fight against Donald Trump as one between a prosecutor and a criminal — describing, from her new campaign headquarters Monday, her experience taking on “predators,” “fraudsters” and “cheaters.”

Trump around the same time, meanwhile, took to Truth Social to call Harris “Dumb as a Rock.”

The comments, both made as Trump and Harris began preparing to take on each other after President Joe Biden announced he would not seek reelection, provided a glimpse into the two candidates’ expected lines of attack.

Trump, who during a rally in Michigan Saturday night called Harris “crazy,” “nuts,” and “Laughing Kamala,” is likely to turn to ad hominem attacks against her, while Harris is expected to lean into her experience as a prosecutor — and Trump’s status as a felon with wide-ranging legal problems.

Trump on Monday fired off a post expressing that he was bothered by the television news coverage he saw of Harris and Biden.

“Wow, just watching the Fake News, and they’re doing their very best to turn the Worst President in the History of our Country into a ‘Brilliant and Heroic Leader’ (He was heroic because he quit!), and to turn “Dumb as a Rock” Kamala Harris from a totally failed and insignificant Vice President into a future “Great” President,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “No, it just doesn’t work that way!”

Trump’s insults of his opponent’s intelligence aren’t limited to Harris. At the rally Saturday, Trump used the word “stupid” no fewer than 13 times, more than half of which were in reference to Biden, who he also repeatedly called “low IQ.” During the Republican primary, Trump nicknamed Nikki Haley “Birdbrain.”

Trump has long deployed sexist remarks against women standing in his way, particularly during his successful 2016 presidential campaign. At the time, he didn’t just attack Hillary Clinton, the first female nominee of a major political party, but others like Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina and conservative journalist Megyn Kelly.

During his campaign against Clinton, Trump made fun of her for “shouting,” accused her of only having “the woman card” to play, of not having “the look” to be president, and notably, of being a “nasty woman.” More recently, Trump has launched personal attacks against Black Democratic women like New York Attorney General Letitia James and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

His comments about women — often brought up by critics discussing his unpresidential “rhetoric” — have previously cost him support with suburban and college educated voters, despite his 2016 Electoral College win. A redeployment of similar verbal assaults against Harris could spell Trump new problems in an election that, for months, he has led solidly.

While Trump has been trying out new nicknames and attack lines against Harris, his campaign and allies, meanwhile, have sought to tie Harris to unpopular Biden policies, chiefly the southern border.

“Same year — same people — same record of failure — same result,” Trump advisers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles wrote of Harris in a “State of Play Day 1” memo Monday night, calling her “Border Czar Kamala Harris.”

Speaking to campaign staff in Wilmington, Delaware on Monday, Harris distilled her case against Trump.

"I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris said. “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type.”

Harris continued by saying Trump “wants to take our country backwards, to a time before many of our fellow American had full freedoms and rights.”>

Curious, is it not how women bring out the worst in <the felon>.

May this tendency cost the Gaslighting Obstructionist Party any chance in November.

<It’s barely been 48 hours since Joe Biden dropped out of the race for the White House, but one thing is clear: Kamala Harris can win.

The Democratic Party, from voters to leaders to delegates to donors, have lined-up behind Vice President Harris. There’s no guarantee yet that she will actually be the candidate. But in 24 hours she raised $81 million and secured enough delegates to win the party’s nomination—not a bad day’s work.

There is, of course, some worried hand-wringing. Most of the worries boil down to “the last time we ran a woman, she lost.” This is true—but it also treats one woman as a stand-in for all women, and derives a sweeping lesson from a single race.

It seems worth mentioning that a white man has lost in every single other election in American history, including two times to a Black man. Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton in 2016, and again to Joe Biden in 2020. We have not extrapolated out from that long history of losses that white men can’t win. We shouldn’t do the same based on the one election in which a woman was a major party’s nominee.

Harris also offers several unique strengths, particularly vis a vis Donald Trump. There is first—and most obviously—the fact that Trump has spent years attacking Biden for his age and cognitive abilities, suggesting that an old man shouldn’t be running the country. That was always a risky move for a candidate who is only three years Biden’s junior, and who will himself be in his 80s, and the oldest president ever, if he wins and serves a full term. But now it looks like an especially boneheaded strategy.

The GOP was remarkably successful at making Biden’s age an issue, and after the disastrous Trump/Biden debate earlier this summer, the entire country has spent the last month talking about how old is too old to sit in the Oval Office, and expressing concerns about the prospect of a very old man leading the nation. Well, Trump is now that very old man. He is a man who is not particularly articulate, and who often fumbles his words and mixes up people, places, and things. Voters have been primed—by him—to be very concerned about age and cognitive function. It was only in contrast to the subdued Biden that he seemed vigorous. Now he is almost surely facing off against a candidate who is two decades younger, appears significantly healthier, and comes across as much more intellectually adept—advantages that will hold true whether the ultimate candidate is Harris or some other, possibly even younger Democrat.

Harris is also a former prosecutor, a fact that hurt her with the left in the 2020 Democratic primary when protests against police violence were raging and criminal justice reform was a bipartisan issue, but which looks very different in 2024. The Trump campaign has made this election partly about crime and safety. If the match-up is Harris versus Trump, then it’s also the prosecutor versus the convicted felon. And the convicted felon oversaw a big jump in the murder rate while he was in office, while the former prosecutor saw murders go down during her time as vice president.

As a prosecutor, Harris’ record is unlikely to please the authoritarian right or the prison-abolitionist left, and she certainly made some missteps, but it’s the kind of reasonably tough-on-crime agenda that average voters might find largely unobjectionable: Opposed to the death penalty but cracking down on gun and violent crimes; diverting first-time non-violent offenders away from prison and into job training and educational programs; telling parents of serially truant students that they could face jail time if they didn’t get their kids in school. As a senator, she worked on bipartisan criminal justice reform initiatives.

As Harris put it during a campaign stop in Delaware on Monday, “I took on perpetrators of all kinds. Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.” And, she said, “I will proudly put my record against his.”

To detractors and skeptics, Harris’s biggest vulnerability is her identity: she’s a woman, and a multi-racial one at that. America has had nearly two and a half centuries of unbroken male rule, and that rule has also been entirely white for every single one of those years except eight—and the lone Black man to ever hold the office was indisputably a unique political talent. Hillary Clinton was one of the most qualified candidates to ever run for the presidency, and she ran against a thoroughly unqualified boor of a man and lost anyway—in part because Trump attracted legions of voters motivated by sexism and thrilled with his misogyny.....>

<....But the peculiarities of an election eight years ago are not identical to the ones at play now. To many voters (including this one), a Clinton win felt inevitable, not urgent. This time around, no one is under the impression that Trump can’t win. And because the history-making quality of the potential first female president doesn’t feel at all preordained but rather like a difficult but in-reach goal, we very well may see many more people willing to work hard and turn out to make it happen.

America in 2024 is not America in 2016, psychologically or demographically. Young voters who were not eligible to cast ballots in 2016 are the most racially diverse in U.S. history. And the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S.? Multi-racial Americans, of which Harris is one: her mother was Indian and her father is Black. This is not to say that multi-racial voters are going to automatically cast their ballots for Harris. It is to say that in a nation where one in ten people now identify as multi-racial—and where nearly 1 in 5 are Latino, and more than 1 in 10 are Black—a Trumpian strategy that depends on racial animus and resentment is a risky bet, not just for the legions of non-white voters, but also for a white American public whose partners, children, grandchildren, neighbors, friends, and loved ones are less likely than ever to be white. Harris’ very existence may indeed push racially-resentful voters further toward Trump. But she may also trigger Trump’s own racial animus, and that very well may turn off even many conservatives.

Nor is Harris blazing a wholly uncharted path. Black women have ascended to positions of power across the U.S., especially in the Democratic Party, where Black women are also the most reliable voting bloc. Black women are, like women more broadly, underrepresented in the halls of power, and particularly in executive roles (no state has ever elected a Black female governor). But Black female executives are far from nonexistent. Black women are mayors of major American cities from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to New Orleans to Washington, D.C. Electing a Black woman president would be huge and historic—and far from impossible.

Harris has also been stronger than Biden on Democrats’ winningest issue: Abortion rights. Everywhere abortion has been on the ballot, abortion has won. Trump has already wisely identified abortion as a losing issue for his campaign and is trying to just not talk about it, while Biden was uniquely bad at talking about it. Trump is responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade and making this whole mess, and picked a vice president who wants a national abortion ban with few exceptions and who dismissed pregnancy from rape as a mere inconvenience. Biden famously avoided saying the word “abortion” at all, and in his debate with Trump turned what should have been a home-run abortion question into a bizarre ramble about women being raped by their in-laws and immigrants killing white girls. Unlike either of these men, Harris has a solid pro-choice record, and the ability to speak cogently and urgently about reproductive rights.

Perhaps most importantly, Harris has momentum behind her. For better or worse, Trump reshaped American politics into something between spectator sport and reality TV. Democratic voters tend to be much more circumspect and rational than Republican ones, showing with their ballots that they prefer competence to drama. But the Biden campaign felt like a collective slog toward inevitable defeat; the primary emotions he invoked were pity and dread.

Biden dropping out and endorsing Harris was not only the biggest news story in the nation, but she immediately racked-up endorsements and donations. And sure, a small handful of donors acted a little salty about a candidate who doesn’t look like them, or like most of the candidates who came before. But Harris largely has the wind at her back.

There are a lot of words that may come to mind when one thinks of Donald Trump, but “new” is not one of them. Harris is not a new kid on the political block, but she has never had the national profile of Biden or Trump, and has been newly propelled to the top of the Democratic candidate pool. She sits at the fortunate intersection of inspiration (a potential first), anger (over anti-abortion laws), novelty, and hope. No amount of campaign spending can buy that kind of emotional resonance. And if she can keep hitting all of these bright notes as she faces off against a sour old man, she can be the person who finally tosses Trump into the trash heap of history, and makes clear that his MAGA movement has fully expired.>

<They really are handling this so well. The Unity '24 Tour Of America has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances—unforeseen to the brainiacs around the Republican nominee, that is. It was completely foreseen by anyone else with a passing interest in who the next president of the United States will be. At the moment, to paraphrase the wisdom of Micheal Ray Richardson, the ship appears to be sinking. From Mediaite:

In a bombastic Truth Social post, Trump wrote, “Why does FoxNews put on Eric Swalwell (Martha!), the total sleazebag Congressman from California? Where is his Chinese Spy girlfriend? What is wrong with FoxNews? It’s RINO Paul Ryan’s fault!”

Wow, just watching the Fake News, and they’re doing their very best to turn the Worst President in the History of our Country into a “Brilliant and Heroic Leader” (He was heroic because he quit!), and to turn “Dumb as a Rock” Kamala Harris from a totally failed and insignificant Vice President into a future “Great” President. No, it just doesn’t work that way!"

The Biden/Harris Administration did not properly protect me, and I was forced to take a bullet for Democracy. IT WAS MY GREAT HONOR TO DO SO!"

Maybe the young Veep candidate can help bail some water out. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Part of the animosity centers around a clash last year over a proposal to rename a national forest in Ohio. Another part of it relates to Vance mocking Indigenous Peoples' Day.

As for the first issue, the Wayne National Forest is named after Revolutionary War Maj. Gen. Anthony Wayne who battled and massacred Indigenous peoples in Ohio. Wayne also forced most of those that remained from their lands, opening the way for white colonizers. When the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service proposed changing the name, citing requests from locals and Indigenous tribes, Vance stood against it.

He wrote, in part, “(Wayne) fought wars and won peace for our government, the government you now serve, and hewed Ohio out of rugged wilderness and occupied enemy territory.”

(Old Mad Anthony Wayne was a piece of work, even after he died of gout. His son disinterred him, boiled the remaining flesh off his bones, and buried them in the family plot back in Pennsylvania. They had to cut the corpse up to make it fit in the kettle. They then put the knives, the flesh, and the water from the kettle back in the original grave. This has been another episode in our continuing series, The Unimaginably Gross History of Early American Republic.)

It would be interesting to hear Vance explain how the indigenous people of the Americas were an "occupying enemy" force. From whom did they occupy it? Woolly Mammoths? Then, standing atop a big pile of Peter Thiel's money, Vance accused Vice President Kamala Harris of being a tool of the plutocrats. From Le Monde:

"The idea of selecting the Democrat Party's nominee because George Soros and Barack Obama and a couple of elite Democrats got in a smoke-filled room and decided to throw Joe Biden overboard, that is not how it works. That is a threat to democracy."

Does Vance think that the Democrats are stewing in anger over how well things have turned out? The Democratic candidate is shattering fundraising records, vetting possible vice-presidents, and she seems to be having a ton of fun doing so. No wonder some of the Trump brainiacs are having second thoughts.>

<I was born in 1946 and raised in a Black coal mining family at the foot of Black Mountain, Kentucky’s highest peak, in Harlan County. From its summit, during my frequent hikes as a teenager, I could see — looking to the northwest — the ridges of Breathitt County, the ancestral homeland of JD Vance. Vance came to my attention with his 2016-published best seller, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” the most derogatory and uncomplimentary stereotype of people from the Appalachian region that I ever read.

Vance’s memoir advanced the viewpoint that economic policies had abandoned the white middle class and tricked poor whites into learned helplessness; the narrative became the spinal column of the catchphrase “Make America Great Again.” “Hillbilly Elegy” was seized up by filmmaker Ron Howard onto the silver screen four years ago, with Oscar-nominated Glenn Close playing the role of his Appalachian-typecast Mamaw; and before the world could say “Apple-lay-cha,” not “Apple-at-cha,” as we natives pronounce it, Vance was swiftly catapulted to a seat in the US Senate in 2022 and on to his recent selection as the 2024 Republican vice presidential candidate. While “Hillbilly Elegy” put Mr. Vance on the cultural map, he was elevated onto the national political mountaintop by Peter Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and extreme right-wing activist with deep ties to another tech oligarch, Elon Musk. Even though Vance referred to Mr. Trump in 2016 as “an irrepressible idiot” and “America’s Hitler,” Mr. Thiel took him to Mar-a-Lago and got Mr. Trump to endorse Vance for the 2022 Ohio Senate race. Musk pledged $45 million a month in support of Trump when Vance was announced as his choice for vice president.

My ties to Appalachia are stronger than Mr. Vance’s: my mother was born a century ago into a coal mining family in Harlan County and my grandfathers, father, four uncles, and oldest brother worked as coal miners in Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia, overlapping, from the time of Reconstruction through the mid-1990s. By the time that the mechanization of coal mining was almost complete in the middle of the 20th century, thousands of families – like Vance’s and mine — had left Central Appalachia for the Midwest, to what came to be called the Rust Belt, by the time Vance was born in 1984. They migrated to cities such as Columbus, Cleveland and Dayton, where many of the working class blacks populated the hyper ghettos. As most who write about Appalachia, Mr. Vance had virtually nothing to say in “Hillbilly Elegy” about the color of the canaries in coal mines or how Black workers were the last hired and first fired in the American manufacturing spaces.

Surely, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (also an up-from-poverty Yale Law School grad with mega-wealthy friends) delights in the choice of Mr. Vance as vice president, what with the similarity of their journeys and political views. In 1980, Thomas, black, while seeking the endorsement of conservatives, described his sister as “dependent” on welfare — and accused her of making her children feel “entitled” to welfare payments instead of being motivated to work. Mr. Vance laid the failure to succeed on the part of working-class whites to their own individual decisions and “hillbilly” culture; since, as whites, they should have achieved the American Dream, just as he, a Yale Law School grad did; but instead, many – like his drug-addicted mother — chose other paths. In Faustian fashion, both sold out and betrayed their “own kind,” their kin and relations....>

<....In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance quite effectively hit a nerve among those who, by the election of 2020, were so openly disgruntled and so ideologically disaffected that they rallied, violently, at the US Capitol on January 6. 2021. Working-class whites – framed by Vance as “victims” of neo-liberal woke-ness, political correctness, and displacement by immigrants – had no better choice to regain their loss status than to zealously support policies that would “Make America Great Again, which, more or less, required the rewriting – and ignoring – of American history. Vance deserves a Pulitzer for his role in this process.

Jennifer Senior, in her review, ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ glorified Mr. Vance’s working class bona fides: “…his ancestors and kin were sharecroppers, coal miners, machinists, millworkers – all low paying, body-wearying occupations that over the years have vanished or offered diminished security.” In “The Harlan Renaissance,” I wrote, “…were it not for the black underclass, Mr. Vance’s working class whites would have had a label much more pejorative than ‘Hillbilly,’ and the book might well have been subtitled: “Thank God for Black People in America!”

There is one standard of analysis that explains the condition and treatment of the Black working class, and another for economically-marginalized whites. The fact that Mr. Vance hardly mentions the experience of Black Appalachians in Hillbilly Elegy shows that he sees racial discrimination as both understandable, normal, and even to be expected. But when the same economic inequality and attendant insecurity applies to whites, even those making the wrong choices, the narrative becomes incomprehensible and perceived as an unendurable and existential threat of the first order. Mr. Vance says, essentially, “This just should not happen to white people in America.”

Many voters agree with Mr. Vance, no matter how cynical the logic or whether a Trump/Vance victory in November will knock America off President Reagan’s “Shining city on the hill.” We’ll see.>

<Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) introduced legislation that singles out a senior federal official for retribution.

The Colorado Republican introduced an amendment to a funding bill that would cut the salary of Melissa Schwartz, works as director of communications in the office of Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, to $1 as punishment for criticizing her, reported Newsweek.

"Melissa Schwartz is yet another horrendous and miserable use of taxpayer dollars," Boebert said on the House floor. "She is a mask-wearing, quadruple-vaxed, Green New Deal extremist and, unfortunately, a liberal troll who has harassed me even in committee hearing rooms. She shouldn't be employed at the Department of [the] Interior. Melissa Schwartz belongs under a bridge."

"Melissa has the nerve and lack of respect to confront me in the halls of Congress following a Department of Interior meeting," the lawmaker added. "In this hearing, she had the audacity to come and personally attack a member of Congress."

Other GOP lawmakers have tried to slash the salaries of other officials in president Joe Biden's administration, including usuccessful attempts by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to cut the salaries of defense secretary Lloyd Austin and homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to $1.

"This DEI hire made clear she doesn't work for the American people and she is simply another misguided mouthpiece for liberal extremists that hates conservatives and people that disagree with her eccentric views," Boebert said of Schwartz, using a slur favored by conservatives to imply non-white, women or LGBTQ employees weren't hired on merit but to satisfy considerations for diversity, equality, and inclusion.

Boebert expressed her interest last week in becoming interior secretary if Donald Trump wins another term in office.

“I think Lauren Boebert needs to be the secretary of the Interior," she told Native America Calling at the time, referring to herself in third person. "President Trump, I would like to be secretary of the Interior.">