What Has She Accomplished As Vice President?

Oh My....,

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theindependent  |  A far-right candidate for Missouri’s Secretary of State posted an ad filmed on the iconic Speaker’s balcony in the US House of Representatives, where campaign and political activities are banned.

Valentina Gomez posted the video on Tuesday afternoon, which was filmed on the iconic balcony looking over Washington, DC connected to Speaker Mike Johnson’s office in the US House of Representatives.

“I am at the Speaker’s Balcony, and they don’t like me here, and neither in Jefferson City. But I don’t give a f***,” Gomez said in the video. “I speak the truth, catch pedophiles, and I will be Missouri’s 41st Secretary of State.”

However, there are a few exceptions to this rule. For example, a representative’s scheduler may coordinate with a campaign scheduler. A representative’s press secretary may also “answer occasional questions on political matters.”

The Independent has contacted Johnson for comment.

When reached for comment, Gomez told The Independent she wants critics to “stop the hypocrisy” and re-affirmed her support for Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance.

“For all of those crying about a 15 second video. Be upset about the 20 million illegals the Biden-Harris Administration allowed into the United States that are raping and killing American women, or the billions sent to Ukraine’s useless war where brave men and women in uniform are being killed, or the J6’rs that are being persecuted and prosecuted, or the grandmas jailed for praying outside of an abortion clinic,” Gomez wrote.

There is no evidence to support the claim that 20 million undocumented immigrants have committed violent crimes. Peer-reviewed studies also indicate that undocumented immigrants are less likely than people born in America to commit violent, drug and property crimes.

In addition, Gomez’s claim that “grandmas” were “jailed” for “praying outside of an abortion clinic” appears to be a reference to the arrest of 75-year-old Paulette Harlow, who was convicted of federal civil rights offenses after she participated in a blockade of an abortion clinic. Her case has been widely misrepresented online, the Associated Press reports, with many falsely claiming she was arrested for praying. 

This isn’t the first time Gomez has come under fire for a campaign video.

Last month, Gomez posted a video calling Juneteenth, the national holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the US following the Civil War, the “most rachet” of holidays.

“Reparations from slavery and Black victimization is about to be shoved down our throats for the most ratchet holiday in America,” she said.

 

 

 

It Wouldn't Have Taken Much To Show Humanity...,

theblaze  |  On Wednesday, Trump sat for questions at a National Association of Black Journalists panel in Washington. The appearance began with immediate contention: Scott didn't say "hello" to Trump but immediately began to grill him with questions implying that he is racist. 

In true Trump form, the former president condemned Scott for her "nasty" question.

Reflecting on the event during a "Fox & Friends" interview, Faulkner — who was one of three black journalists to question Trump at the NABJ event — expressed dismay over how Trump was treated.

Not only did audio and technical problems snare the event — issues Faulkner attributed to the NABJ and ABC News — but Faulkner blasted Scott, though without naming her, for stirring up emotion through "gotcha moments" that grabbed headlines. She mourned the fact that emotionally charged moments grabbed headlines instead of the fact that Trump, according to Faulkner, willingly walked "into a racial storm."

But that's not the only problem with the event, Faulkner went on to say.

Like Trump, Faulkner took significant issue with the fact that Trump was not given a proper welcome.

"He walks out on stage and not a greeting to acknowledge it's been 18 days at that point since you survived an assassination attempt. 'We're going to ask you tough questions, but Mr. President, welcome, and we are glad you're still here,'" she said.

"I mean, it didn't take much to show humanity, and in that moment, I was so disappointed that that didn't happen," she added. "I couldn't control it, but it got things off to an emotional start, and you and I both know that once that happens and you are interviewing someone, there is an agenda."

At the end of her reflection, Faulkner made a prediction about the 2024 election: The only color that will matter is green.

"I don't know that people are going to vote on the color of their skin and the hair texture this time around," she predicted. "This is about money, the color is green."

 

An Empty Suit Is Only A Small Improvement Over Senile Dementia

politico  |  Kamala Harris launched her first presidential campaign five years ago to great expectations. She had a growing profile as a no-nonsense interrogator in the Senate, heavyweight support from Hollywood to Wall Street and the raw talent of a once-in-a-generation leader.

Harris’ admirers — not to mention aides and members of her inner circle — detest the mere thought of that painful time. She’s been vice president for four years, they say, standing in for President Joe Biden around the world and becoming the party’s preeminent voice on abortion rights. She’s confident, they contend, and battle-tested. The Kamala Harris of 2024 is light-years better than the Harris of 2019.But the searing experience remains an indelible stain on her image, even after the 59-year-old Democrat spent the last half-decade steadily improving on the biggest stage imaginable.

Her near-perfect introduction as the Democrats’ standard-bearer is a testament to the hard work she’s put in. But Harris has never dealt with an opponent as ferocious as former President Donald Trump. He’ll seize on any perceived weakness and attack every vulnerability.

That means she needs to figure out how to neutralize her exposure on the border and immigration. Harris will need a crisp answer when talking about stubbornly high inflation. She must stem the slow-rolling erosion of the Democratic coalition that occurred on Biden’s watch and energize young voters, Latinos and other voters of color while holding Biden’s white working-class support across the industrial Midwestern battleground states. As a woman of color, she has to worry about calibrating her approach in ways that may seem unfair, and, at times, limiting. She has a momentous decision to make — her own vice presidential pick — and very little time to make it. In short, there is no margin for the kind of errors that plagued her first presidential bid.

To do all these things, and win the 100-day sprint to Election Day, she’ll need to bury the ghosts of that first bid. Here’s how she can do it:

 

 

This is amazing 😂
pic.twitter.com/KpnBKGUUwn

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 26, 2024

Kamala Devi Is To American Politics What Mentholated Cigarettes Are To American Negroes...,

That's What's Up....,

Two Weeks Ago I Predicted Kamala Or Bust....,

 

I Didn't Think This Would Happen Until Tomorrow...,

Live Updates: Biden Drops Out of Presidential Race, Endorses Harris

President Biden wrote on social media that he was ending his campaign for re-election after intense pressure from within his own party. He subsequently endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him atop the Democratic ticket.

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President Biden announced on Twitter on Sunday that he will no longer seek re-election.Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

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July 21, 2024, 2:21 p.m. ET4 minutes ago

4 minutes ago

Michael D. Shear

Biden’s decision throws the 2024 race into disarray. Here’s the latest.

President Biden, 81, abandoned his bid for re-election and threw the 2024 presidential contest into chaos on Sunday, caving to relentless pressure from his closest allies to drop out of the race amid deep concerns that he is too old and frail to defeat former President Donald J. Trump. After calling Vice President Kamala Harris an “extraordinary partner,” he endorsed her to take his place atop the ticket.

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your president,” he wrote on social media. “And while it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus entirely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.”

After three weeks of often angry refusals to step aside, Mr. Biden finally yielded to a torrent of devastating polls, urgent pleas from Democratic lawmakers and clear signs that donors were no longer willing to pay for him to continue.

Mr. Biden’s decision abruptly ends one political crisis that began when the president delivered a calamitous debate performance against Mr. Trump on June 27. But for the Democratic Party, Mr. Biden’s withdrawal triggers a second crisis: who to replace him with, and specifically whether to rally around Ms. Harris or kick off a rapid effort to find someone else to be the party’s nominee.

The announcement by Mr. Biden, who is isolating with Covid, came just three days after Mr. Trump delivered an incendiary, insult-laden speech accepting his party’s nomination for a chance to return to the White House for a second term. Mr. Trump, who has been preparing for a rematch with Mr. Biden for years, will now face a different — and as yet, unknown — Democratic opponent, with only 110 days left until Election Day.

Here’s what else to know:

• A political first: No sitting American president has dropped out of a race so late in the election cycle. The Democratic National Convention, where Mr. Biden was to have been formally nominated by 3,939 delegates, is scheduled to begin Aug. 19 in Chicago. That leaves less than a month for Democrats to decide who should replace Mr. Biden on the ticket and just under four months for that person to mount a campaign against Mr. Trump.
• Spotlight on Harris: The president’s decision puts the vice president under renewed scrutiny, with some Democrats arguing that she is the only person who can effectively challenge Mr. Trump this late in the election. And they say the party will fracture if Democratic leaders are seen as passing over the first Black vice president. But others argue that the Democratic Party should avoid a coronation, especially given Ms. Harris’s political weaknesses over the last three-and-a-half years.
• Age a chief concern: Mr. Biden’s re-election bid was brought down by longstanding concerns about his age and whether he remains physically and mentally capable of performing the job. Even before the debate, polls consistently showed that people thought he was too old, and majorities — even of Democrats — wanted someone younger to be president. Mr. Biden was born during World War II and was first elected to the Senate in 1972, before two-thirds of today’s Americans were even born. Mr. Biden would have been 86 at the end of a second term.
• The debate moment: The White House and aides closest to Mr. Biden denied for years that his age was having any impact on his ability to do his job. But the debate with Mr. Trump in late June, which was watched by more than 50 million people, put his limitations clearly on display. He appeared frail, hesitant, confused and diminished, and was unable to make the case against Mr. Trump, a convicted felon who tried to overturn the last presidential election.

July 21, 2024, 2:23 p.m. ET3 minutes ago

3 minutes ago

Theodore Schleifer

Ron Klain, the former chief of staff to President Biden, blamed “donors and electeds” for having “pushed out the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump.”

Ronald Klain

@RonaldKlain

·

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Now that the donors and electeds have pushed out the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump, it’s time to end the political fantasy games and unite behind the only veteran of a national campaign — our outstanding @vp, @KamalaHarris!! Let’s get real and win in November!

6:19 PM · Jul 21, 2024

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July 21, 2024, 2:22 p.m. ET4 minutes ago

4 minutes ago

Nicholas Nehamas

As President Biden recovered from Covid this week, Vice President Kamala Harris had already assumed the starring role on the campaign trail. She hosted rallies in two battleground states, Michigan and North Carolina, and headlined a fundraiser that brought in $2 million in Massachusetts on Saturday.

Read Biden’s Letter Withdrawing From the Race

President Biden announced on social media that he was abandoning his re-election bid.

July 21, 2024, 2:21 p.m. ET5 minutes ago

5 minutes ago

Maggie Astor

Where Kamala Harris stands on the issues: abortion, immigration and more.

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Vice President Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Las Vegas in July. Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

With Vice President Kamala Harris being eyed as a potential replacement for President Biden on the Democratic ticket, her stances on key issues will be scrutinized by both parties and the nation’s voters.

She has a long record in politics: as district attorney of San Francisco, as attorney general of California, as a senator, as a presidential candidate and as vice president.

Here is an overview of where she stands.

Abortion

Ms. Harris supports legislation that would protect the right to abortion nationally, as Roe v. Wade did before it was overturned in 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

After the Dobbs ruling, she became central to the Biden campaign’s efforts to keep the spotlight on abortion, given that Mr. Biden — with his personal discomfort with abortion and his support for restrictions earlier in his career — was a flawed messenger. In March, she made what was believed to be the first official visit to an abortion clinic by a president or vice president.

She consistently supported abortion rights during her time in the Senate, including cosponsoring legislation that would have banned common state-level restrictions, like requiring doctors to perform specific tests or have hospital admitting privileges in order to provide abortions.

As a presidential candidate in 2019, she argued that states with a history of restricting abortion rights in violation of Roe should be subject to what is known as pre-clearance for new abortion laws — those laws would have to be federally approved before they could take effect. That proposal is not viable now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe.

Climate change

Ms. Harris has supported the Biden administration’s climate efforts, including legislation that provided hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and rebates for renewable energy and electric vehicles.

“It is clear the clock is not just ticking, it is banging,” she said in a speech last year, referring to increasingly severe and frequent disasters spurred by climate change. “And that is why, one year ago, President Biden and I made the largest climate investment in America’s history.”

During her 2020 presidential campaign, she emphasized the need for environmental justice, a framework that calls for policies to address the adverse effects that climate change has on poor communities and people of color. She has emphasized that as vice president as well.

In 2019, Ms. Harris, then a senator, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, introduced legislation that would have evaluated environmental rules and laws by how they affected low-income communities. It would have also established an independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability and created a “senior adviser on climate justice” within several federal agencies. In 2020, Ms. Harris introduced a more sweeping version of the bill. None of the legislation was passed.

Democracy

Ms. Harris was tasked with leading the Biden administration’s efforts to secure voting rights legislation, a job she asked for. The legislation — which went through several iterations but was ultimately blocked in the Senate — would have countered voting restrictions in Republican-led states, limited gerrymandering and regulated campaign finance more strictly.

This year, she met with voting rights advocates and described a strategy that included creating a task force on threats to election workers and challenging state voting restrictions in court.

She has condemned former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. In a speech in 2022 marking the anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, she said that day had showed “what our nation would look like if the forces who seek to dismantle our democracy are successful.” She added, “What was at stake then, and now, is the right to have our future decided the way the Constitution prescribes it: by we the people, all the people.”

Economic policy

In campaign events this year, Ms. Harris has promoted the Biden administration’s economic policies, including the infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden signed, funding for small businesses, a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that capped the cost of insulin for people on Medicare and student debt forgiveness.

She indicated at an event in May that the administration’s policies to combat climate change would also bring economic benefits by creating jobs in the renewable energy industry. At another event, she promoted more than $100 million in Energy Department grants for auto parts manufacturers to pivot to electric vehicles, which she said would “help to keep our auto supply chains here in America.”

As a senator, she introduced legislation that would have provided a tax credit of up to $6,000 for middle- and low-income families, a proposal she emphasized during her presidential campaign as a way to address income inequality.

Immigration

One of Ms. Harris’s mandates as vice president has been to address the root causes of migration from Latin America, like poverty and violence in migrants’ home countries. Last year, she announced $950 million in pledges from private companies to support Central American communities. Similar commitments made previously totaled about $3 billion.

In 2021, she visited the U.S.-Mexico border and said: “This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about suffering.”

More recently, she backed a bipartisan border security deal that Mr. Biden endorsed but Mr. Trump, by urging Republican lawmakers to kill it, effectively torpedoed. The legislation would have closed the border if crossings reached a set threshold, and it would have funded thousands of new border security agents and asylum officers. “We are very clear, and I think most Americans are clear, that we have a broken immigration system and we need to fix it,” Ms. Harris said in March.

Israel and Gaza

Ms. Harris called in March for an “immediate cease-fire” in Gaza and described the situation there as a “humanitarian catastrophe.” She said that “the threat Hamas poses to the people of Israel must be eliminated” but also that “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”

In an interview later that month, she emphasized her opposition to an Israeli invasion of Rafah, the city in southern Gaza to which more than a million people had fled. “I have studied the maps,” she said. “There’s nowhere for those folks to go, and we’re looking at about 1.5 million people in Rafah who are there because they were told to go there, most of them.”

She has said on multiple occasions that she supports a two-state solution.

Racial justice

Racial justice was a theme of Ms. Harris’s presidential campaign. In a memorable debate exchange in 2019, she denounced Mr. Biden’s past work with segregationist senators and opposition to school busing mandates.

She has called for ending mandatory minimum sentences, cash bail and the death penalty, which disproportionately affect people of color.

Amid the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, she was one of the senators who introduced the Justice in Policing Act, which would have made it easier to prosecute police officers, created a national registry of police misconduct and required officers to complete training on racial profiling. It was not passed.

Her record as a prosecutor also came into play during her presidential campaign. Critics noted that as attorney general of California, she had generally avoided stepping in to investigate police killings.

July 21, 2024, 2:21 p.m. ET5 minutes ago

5 minutes ago

Catie Edmondson

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, says in a statement: “Joe Biden has not only been a great president and a great legislative leader but he is a truly amazing human being. His decision of course was not easy, but he once again put his country, his party, and our future first.

“Joe, today shows you are a true patriot and great American.”

July 21, 2024, 2:20 p.m. ET6 minutes ago

6 minutes ago

Lisa Lerer

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan says she will not be running for president with Biden out. “My job in this election will remain the same: doing everything I can to elect Democrats and stop Donald Trump,” she wrote on social media.

July 21, 2024, 2:17 p.m. ET9 minutes ago

9 minutes ago

Erica L. Green

In a post on X, President Biden has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee. “Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year," he wrote. "Democrats — it’s time to come together and beat Trump. Let’s do this."

July 21, 2024, 2:17 p.m. ET9 minutes ago

9 minutes ago

Shane Goldmacher

In a post on X, Biden endorses Harris.

July 21, 2024, 2:15 p.m. ET11 minutes ago

11 minutes ago

Simon J. Levien

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California put out a statement on X saying that Biden “will go down in history as one of the most impactful and selfless presidents.” Before Biden dropped out, Newsom was often considered a contender to take his place on the ticket.

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Credit...Jim Vondruska for The New York Times

July 21, 2024, 2:13 p.m. ET13 minutes ago

13 minutes ago

Lisa Lerer

The conversation will immediately move to Vice President Kamala Harris and how much support she will have within the party, and whether Biden will offer a full-throated endorsement of her as his replacement on the ticket.

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Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

July 21, 2024, 2:10 p.m. ET16 minutes ago

16 minutes ago

Jonathan Swan

As Maggie Haberman and I reported yesterday, the Trump team has been preparing for an advertising onslaught against Kamala Harris, who they assume will be the Democratic candidate. They have also been paying close attention to Josh Shapiro, who governs a state — Pennsylvania — that the Trump team is focused on winning to block Democrats’ path to the White House.