Prosecutor v Persecutor ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️

Democrats in Array:  Democrats are no longer in disarray.  With President Biden, who will be speaking tonight about his decision, no longer running, without chaos but with lots of enthusiasm they have lined up behind Vice President Kamala Harris.  Although a few holdouts remain, including Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib who rarely throws her support to anything not related to Palestinians, and a very small group of vulnerable red district or state Democrats such as Alaska’s Mary Peltola, Washington’s Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Maine’s Jared Golden who is generally an outlier, and embattled Montana Senator Jon Tester, almost all Democratic House and Senate members have endorsed her or at the very least said that they will support her run.  Harris also has more than enough delegate votes to become the official nominee. Despite preferences by some donors and pundits for a more robust selection process, perhaps a series of debates or even a primary of some sort, the reality is that given campaign finance laws that made it difficult for Biden’s campaign funds to go to anyone else, Biden’s late withdrawal, his endorsement, and the tight calendar a “process” was never in the cards. As to the calendar squeeze, the Democratic convention is late this cycle because of the Olympics and because Republicans got the earlier calendar slot. To ensure that their presidential and VP candidates are on the ballot everywhere, including in states with early ballot deadlines and uncooperative Republican election officials, Democrats had already decided to hold a virtual delegate roll call to appoint and qualify Biden and Harris.  Now that roll call, scheduled to take place in early August,  will be used to appoint Harris and her VP pick which also explains why Harris needs to vet and select her running mate well before the convention.  That vetting process is underway now, being undertaken by Eric Holder, former President Obama’s Attorney General.

But Her Laugh: The good news is that Kamala Harris’ candidacy is generating a huge amount of enthusiasm.  Endorsements and cash are rolling in, with the first day haul from small donors now estimated at $100 million. Even George Clooney is back on board and those big donor cash infusions that he helped hold up they are expected to be incoming shortly. The concern, and it’s a big one, is whether all the enthusiasm will translate into votes, especially in the critical swing states. For what it’s worth, the first post Biden poll completed by Reuters/Ipsos shows Harris slightly ahead of Trump in a two-person race and even more ahead when RFK Jr is added to the mix.  That’s an improvement over where Biden stood but it’s a national poll and what matters are the swing state polls.  It’s also worth noting that Trump did not get a post-convention/post assassination attempt bump even in the polls that paired him against Biden.  Though it’s likely that Harris will pull in more of the young voters who wanted little to do with either of the two old guys and that she has energized the Black and maybe even the Hispanic communities, she may not hold on to the all the older white voters who made up Biden’s coalition and those voters are key in the whiter swing states.  The bottom line is that while enthusiasm is great it’s way too early to tell if she’ll rack up more votes than Biden.  That said, judging by her appearance at what is now her campaign headquarters in Delaware as well as her speech at her first official campaign stop in Wisconsin, Kamala has upped her game significantly since 2020. Naturally, that’s freaking Republicans who have already started attacking her and they’re not even bothering to dog whistle, they’re going full on racist and sexist, calling her a DEI candidate, attacking her for being childless, and suggesting that she slept her way to the top. That last one is both particularly disgusting and ironic given that her opponent is an overgrown nepo baby who’s been married three times, engaged in multiple “affairs” while his current wife was home with their newborn son, and that his current wife, as opposed to Kamala’s husband Doug Emhoff, appears to only show up when contractually obligated to do so. 

Memes and Fog:  When her daughters complained about their troubles, Kamala’s mother would say “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree.”  That explains the current fascination with coconut themed drinks. You may also have heard Kamala referred to as Brat. That comes from British pop singer Charli xcx who tweeted “kamala IS brat” right after she received Biden’s endorsement. I am too old to know for certain, but I think that means Kamala is effortlessly super cool.  And the lime green thing is from Charli’s Brat album cover.  Whatever.   Bibi Netanyahu is in Washington today where he’ll be speaking in front of Congress.  It’s going to be very, very messy, possibly even violent in DC today and not all Democrats will be in attendance.  Republicans are making hay out of that as well as the fact that Kamala won’t be there, she’ll be at a previously scheduled event in Indiana and is scheduled to meet with Bibi later in the week.  But JD Vance won’t be there either because he is also on the road.  As to JD Vance who’s all in on Diet Mountain Dew which is apparently the drink of his people whoever those people are, if you think that’s racist according to JD that’s on you, reports are that Trump is having second thoughts about picking him as his running mate because Vance is falling flat on the road where his speaking style is somewhere between boring and pathetic. Is there a Mountain Dew meme yet? Maybe Mike Pence, the guy Trump tried to hang, is still available?  Shifting back to Israel and Gaza, the thorn in the Democrat’s side, per the NY Times, though Kamala has expressed more sympathy for the Gazans than Biden there’s no reason to think that her policies with regard to Israel are much different than Biden’s though, in addition to painting her as an extreme socialist left winger, Republicans also want everyone to believe that she’s wears a Kaffiyeh under her suit. 

And:  Convicted New Jersey Senator Bob Menedez has notified Senate Leader Chuck Schumer that he will be leaving the Senate on August 20 right after his last paycheck clears.  New Jersey’s Democratic Governor Murphy is expected to appoint an as yet unnamed Democrat to temporarily fill Menendez’s seat until next January.  That person will not be Murphy’s wife who at one time sought the seat nor will it be Representative Andy Kim, the Democrat who is running to replace Menendez. Secret Service head Kimberly Cheatle is no longer the head of the Secret Service.  While Trump survived the attempt on his life and ear, she did not in part because both Democrats and Republicans found her performance at this week’s Congressional hearings to be rather dismal but mostly because the Secret Service appears to have messed up bigly.  Last night Lawrence O’Donnell listed all of the times presidents have been shot at, it’s a fairly long list that in addition to JFK’s assassination, includes two attempts in 17 days on Gerald Ford and the shooting of Ronald Reagan.  It took much longer for the heads in charge at the times of those attacks to be fired but things happen faster these days, so Cheatle is out.  Good luck to the next guy, running the Secret Service is not easy particularly given the proliferation of guns.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow