Kamala Harris Sticks the Landing
Election Wrapup for October 30, 2024
With the White House as a backdrop, 75,000 Americans saw Presidential candidate Kamala Harris deliver what was billed as her closing argument. There were no partisan flags or placards to be seen from the stage, just enthusiastic people waving American flags and signs that said USA
Via the Guardian:
“In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office,” she said as the crowd – which the campaign placed at 75,000 – erupted into chants of “Kamala! Kamala!” “On day one, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she continued. “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”
The oval-shaped park also served as reminder of Trump’s actions on January 6, when he exhorted his followers to “fight like hell” and walk to the Capitol where Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Aggrieved and “obsessed with revenge”, Trump was “out for unchecked power” , Harris warned, charging that he would spend the next four years focused on his problems, not the country’s.
Throughout the speech Harris did what her opponent claims (and fails) to do, successfully weaving policy issues and making the case against voting for Donald Trump. The Ellipse rally was remarkable for how well a large event was managed. Kamala Harris was supposed to speak at 7:30; she started at 7:37. And she finished at 8:07, just one minute before the first pitch was thrown at the Yankees-Dodgers World Series.
The Republican candidate, speaking to a rally in majority-Latino Allentown, Pennsylvania, claimed that nobody had ever done more for Puerto Rico than he did during his first administration. Protesters, motivated by racist content at the Maison Square Garden rally on Sunday, remembered paper towels being thrown by Trump at a desperate crowd, and $20 million in FEMA aid being withheld after hurricane Maria.
One thing you can always be assured of is that Donald Trump will be sensitive to claims about crowd size, and he didn’t disappoint on Tuesday, asserting that the Harris campaign bused supporters into Washington DC.
One person working security at the Harris rally didn’t have to be bused in. NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly spotted police officer Daniel Hodges, considered a hero at the January 6, 2021 coup attempt for holding back rioters at the Capital’s west tunnel.
The former president did manage to squeeze out yet another threat, this time at former First Lady Michelle Obama, whose appearances in support of Harris/Walz have been highly rated for their impact.
"We're gonna turn this country around and show how bad they were ... if I hit her, they'll say, 'oh, what a horrible thing it was.'" -- Trump on Michelle Obama
Voting News from San Diego and elsewhere…
As of Tuesday afternoon, 50.46 million Americans had already voted, according to NBCNews
The details:
1.1 million have voted early in the 7 swing states.
1,141,620 more women have voted than men, 55.2-44.8%.
Gender turnout gap is F+14-points in MI, F+13 in PA, F+12 in GA, F+11 in NC, F+8 in WI, F+4 in AZ, F-2 in NV.
And polling continues to show that driving up female turnout is, on the whole, helping the vice president. A recent ABC/Ipsos poll shows Harris with a 19 percentage point lead among suburban women, up from 10 points in October and now-President Joe Bidens’ six-point lead in 2020. At the same time, Harris has cut Trump’s 27-point margin of victory in 2020 with white women without a college degree in half, a recent Marist Poll shows.
The gender gap doesn’t seem to show up in local results. Axios San Diego published a rundown of what’s known about voter turnout in San Diego;
Twenty-seven percent of voters in San Diego County have already voted.
The 536,875 ballots returned so far trails the 715,786 cast by this point in 2020, which set turnout records.
In the city of San Diego, 26% of voters have cast their ballots, with 50% of those coming from Democrats, 26% from Republicans and 25% from independents.
Of those ballots, 65% came from white voters, 19% came from Latinos, 13% from Asian voters and 5% from Black voters.
The ballots returned so far are disproportionately from older voters, with 43% from people over 65, and another 25% from those between 50 and 64.
Men and women represent an equal share of the ballots cast so far.
Voter Fraud: More Republican Supporters Acting Badly
In case you haven’t heard, non-citizen voting is a big issue in Trumpland this year. Because no explanation exists for why down ballot Republicans win when Donald Trump doesn’t, the conspiracy laden minds at MAGA have accepted as a fact that gazillions of migrants are being registered to vote by Democrats.
It’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, but that hasn’t stopped the Freedom Caucus in Congress from insisting that another law was needed. And the former president has made voter fraud a centerpiece in his campaign, saying that ballot box stuffing is the only way he can’t win.
Via Joyce Vance:
In September, Trump told the Fraternal Order of Police in a speech to “Watch for the voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud, we win so easily.”
“We have to vote and we have to make sure that we stop them from cheating, because they cheat like dogs,” he said in Atlanta in August.
The bought and paid for Supreme Court ruled this morning that Virginia can continue scrubbing its voter rolls in search of non-citizens.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) asked the justices to intervene after two lower courts blocked his efforts to cancel the registrations of voters who could be noncitizens — an issue Republican officials have seized on nationally to energize supporters even though noncitizen voting is extremely rare.
Meanwhile, the actual shenanigans are continuing to be reported. Guess what? There ain’t no Democrats or “illegals” involved.
From Action TV News:
Charles Pierce is a 70-year-old former landlord of the Manzanita Manor Apartments in Redding. Pierce says he was fired from his role after his reddit posts came to light.
Pierce told Action News Now that under a now-deleted account, he posted that he received mail-in ballots of four previous tenants at the Manzanita Manor Apartments.
In a post to Reddit, Pierce claimed that he used all of the four ballots to cast votes for former President Donald Trump, and to vote "no" on all rent control and school bond measures in Shasta County.
An Indiana Republican trying to discredit voting machines got caught. From Fox59 TV News:
A former Republican candidate running for an Indiana seat in the U.S. House of Representatives has been arrested and charged with stealing several election ballots during a recent voting machine test.
Larry L. Savage Jr., a candidate in the Republican 5th District primary held earlier this year, was arrested Tuesday morning by Madison County authorities and charged with destroying/misplacing a ballot and theft. He has since been released on a $500 cash bond.
From Action News Jacksonville:
An 18-year-old man remained in Duval County jail Wednesday morning after Neptune Beach police said he was antagonizing voters. Caleb Williams, who was scheduled to go before a Duval County judge Wednesday, is charged with aggravated assault on persons 65 years or older and improper exhibition of firearm or dangerous weapon.
Just after 4 p.m. Tuesday at the Beaches Branch Library, an early voting location in Neptune Beach, police received calls about a man holding a machete. Officers arrived and witnesses pointed out Williams who was standing with a group of males near a truck in the parking lot.
The group reportedly arrived to protest, displaying Trump flags and one of them holding a Trump sign with a machete, police said. Action News Jax received video of the group showing them holding Trump flags chanting the former president’s name and Williams holding a Trump flag attached to a machete.
There are lots more stories about fraudulent voting and intimidation at polling places and Donald Trump is inventing them where he thinks they’re needed. On Monday, he took to Truth Social to berate election officials in Lancaster County Pennsylvania about “2600 Fake Ballots and Forms, all written by the same person.”
The truth of the matter is that no ballots were being questioned, but some voter registration forms have been flagged prior to being accepted.
News of the fraudulent registration applications came after a fake video circulated on social media purporting to show mail-in ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, being opened and destroyed; the local Board of Elections said the envelopes and materials in the video are not those used by the county.
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Coming Soon: Agenda 47?
As Donald Trump and right-wing media allies are expressing unbridled confidence about winning the November 2 election, Fox News stars and assorted GOP luminaries are fantasizing how Trump will implement his second-term agenda.
Professional Nihilist and Podcaster Steve Bannon got out of jail on Tuesday, and immediately called for Donald Trump to go ahead and say he’s already won the election.
House Speaker Mike Johnson let the cat out of the bag on plans to repeal Obamacare at a GOP event in Pennsylvania. Via NBC News:
“We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state. These agencies have been weaponized against the people. It’s crushing the free market; it’s like a boot on the neck of job creators and entrepreneurs and risk takers. And so health care is one of the sectors, and we need this across the board,” Johnson said. “And Trump’s going to go big. I mean, he’s only going to have one more term. Can’t run for re-election. And so he’s going to be thinking about legacy, and we’re going to fix these things.”
Immigrant South African, Elon Musk, having been promised the role of head cost cutter in a Trump administration, says he’ll slice off two trillion dollars, a little less than one-third of the total US budget, to start.
Sure, between this and the tariffs, the economy will crash, but that “necessarily involves some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”
Anybody wanna guess who’ll get to experience that hardship?
As President Biden might say, here’s the deal:
Two-thirds of all federal programmatic spending is on just 4 things: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense. If someone is promising to cut the budget by one-third, either they are cutting those four things, or they are eliminating everything else. It's that simple.
Veterans benefits and healthcare
- Unemployment insurance
- Highway construction and repair
- Air traffic safety
- K-12 school funding
- The Coast Guard
- Cancer research
- Food stamps
- National parks
- Head Start
Robert F Kennedy Jr is proclaiming a Trump administration will be giving him power over the nation’s public health agencies. Nobody knows exactly what that means or which agencies might be involved, but the very idea should send chills down your spine.
Besides his anti-vax stance, RFKjr believes that 5G phone networks are being used for mass surveillance, wifi causes chronic illness, chemicals in drinking water are turning people trans, and school shootings are increasing because kids take antidepressants.
Let’s hear it for epidemics!
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Wednesday News to Peruse
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Project 2025 Is January 6's Attempted Coup Dressed in a Nice Suit | Opinion by San Diego Congress Member Sara Jacobs (you go, girl!) in Newsweek
Jan. 6, 2021, was an unmistakable coup attempt—it was a big, violent attack on the U.S. Capitol that sought to keep Donald Trump in power against the will of the people. Project 2025 is a different tactic but has the same goal. If re-elected as president, Trump would insulate himself from checks on his power while dramatically increasing it. But drawing from my background, I know the antidote to Project 2025.
First, we need to elect Vice President Kamala Harris as president—but truthfully, that's not enough to repair all the damage done. We need full accountability from the attack on Jan. 6—for everyone who committed, incited, or encouraged violence. I've seen that in countries where a first coup attempt wasn't met with swift actions that held the culprits accountable, subsequent attempts were much more likely to succeed. But even more importantly, we need to prove that our democratic norms and institutions are worth trusting and fighting for by delivering on the big promises we've made. This is the most significant thing we can do to build trust with the American people, ensuring people feel seen, heard, and included by our government.
In the long term, we will never fully be unified as a country until we focus on healing the deep divisions and feelings of mistrust and resentment. Addressing these fault lines in our society—especially around race and inequality—will require a systematic, nationwide community dialogue and truth and reconciliation process.
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Suit claims ICE illegally withheld $300M via The Associated Press
Immigration bonds are set by ICE and immigration judges and allow noncitizens who are facing removal proceedings to be released in the U.S. while their cases are decided in court. The average bail payment is $6,000 according to the lawsuit.
Based on information obtained through public records requests and other cases, there are tens of thousands of class members, the lawsuit claims. “The precise number and identification of the class members will be ascertainable from the government’s records,” it says.
Once the immigration case has concluded, family and friends of those detained are entitled to get their money back immediately in some cases or within 60 days in others, according to the online ICE handbook. ICE, however, “regularly fails to return these funds, even when all conditions have been met and proceedings have concluded,” according to the lawsuit.
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If You Think You Can Hold a Grudge, Consider the Crow by Thomas Fuller at The New York Times
How long do crows hold a grudge? Dr. Marzluff believes he has now answered the question: around 17 years.
His estimate is based on an experiment that he began in 2006 on the Washington campus. Dr. Marzluff captured seven crows with a net while wearing that ogre mask. The birds were soon set free, but, Dr. Marzluff says, the episode traumatized the crows and other members of the murder that witnessed it.
To test how long the campus’s birds would hold onto their grudge, Dr. Marzluff or his research assistants would put on the ogre mask periodically and walk around campus, recording how many crows let out aggressive caws, a sound that experts call scolding. The number of scolding crows crescendoed around seven years into the experiment, when around half the crows he encountered cawed vociferously.
Bravo!!!