Master Class in the Art of Timing

 

That's one of the best put-downs I've ever seen.

 

Election Excitement

 

By Jack Yordy, Guest-Posting:

Democrats are finally excited and it is showing.

During a canvass training last weekend, two people showed up separately asking how they could donate to Kamala Harris’s campaign. Another arrived while I was making phone calls for volunteers a few days later looking for signs for Kamala Harris. On one of our canvasses, we got to pet a pig while we discussed local and national issues with its owner. She was unaffiliated but was steadfast in her commitment to voting for Harris, as she has two daughters and is excited about a potential first female president in her lifetime.

Our Voter Registration training sessions are filling up quickly. We had our first training on Wednesday of last week and volunteers were asked how they were feeling about the election. The words “excited,” “energized,” and “determined” were their top descriptors, and the energy in the room was very positive.

Social Media platforms have seen an explosion of enthusiasm around the 2024 election. As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz put it, “that’s my canary in the coal mine,” suggesting that the online shift in energy precedes a far more difficult campaign for Trump. There are new hilariously popular and positive memes about Kamala Harris, including the "coconut tree" and "brat summer," which are essentially descriptions of Harris’ vibe and expressions of excitement about her as a candidate. Discussions and excitement about the election on social media point to a big cultural shift around the election. No one wants to post or consume content about something boring, depressing, or even scary. People do, however, take an interest in excitement and hope, and that’s what Harris has brought to the table.

Volunteers are coming to us and those that we reach out to are much more interested in volunteering than before. Harris’s campaign has reinvigorated the Democratic base and is bringing new people in. This is especially important to Watauga’s issues as well. With a referendum for fair County Commission maps and three important school board races on our ballot in November, we need to be able to reach as many Watauga voters as we can. With this kind of energy and enthusiasm, we can. 

Jack Yordy is president of the AppState College Democrats and Canvassing Director for the Watauga County Democratic Party.  

Judge Bob Orr Joins the Kamala Harris Campaign

 

Donald Trump broke the Republican Party for former Republican NC Supreme Court Justice Bob Orr. Orr was a John Kasich delegate from NC to the 2016 Republican National Convention. He left the convention early rather than witness Trump's coronation but not before commenting to a WRAL reporter that Donald Trump was “singularly unqualified to lead this country.” In fact, Orr said, "Trump is a danger to the country." Orr finally broke formally from the GOP, changing his registration to Unaffiliated in 2021.

Aside from having served as the appointed District Attorney serving Watauga County and the rest of the 24th Prosecutorial District in 2014 (to finish the term of DA Jerry Wilson), Orr had already built an impressive record of service. He was appointed to the NC Court of Appeals by Republican Governor Jim Martin in 1986. He won election to the NC Supreme Court in 1994 and served there for ten years. He ran for governor in the Republican primary of 2008, losing to Pat McCrory. He believes in our Constitution, and he clearly thinks that Trump is out to trash it.

And now he's been chosen to lead an effort to organize independents and moderate Republicans in NC for Kamala Harris. “As we approach the final days of this election, there has never been a more important time for Republicans, former Republicans and unaffiliated voters who lean Republican, to come together and put country over party by working to elect Kamala Harris and stopping Donald Trump,” Orr said in a statement.

The Wrath of Women

 

After the Dobbs decision, we believed the sudden end of a right women had counted on since 1973 would energize the vote for Democrat Joe Biden in 2024. But that strike-back energy on the left slowly dissipated even as the image of Joe Biden deflated. By just a few weeks ago, it didn't seem like woman power could save him.

Things are different now.

There are goddesses among us, and they are by gawd NOT going to be disrespected. The disrespect, rising in some extreme bros as outright hatred, is embodied by nobody better than J.D.Vance, who has made the case repeatedly that women are primarily breed stock, and Vance is connected through the psychic umbilical cord to that other man, Donald J. Trump, who in May 2023 was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, that trial but a substitute for all the other accusations against Trump by other women. The goddesses don't forget this shit.

The goddess Taylor Swift begins to resemble Winged Justice as she gets more and more politically involved with voting rights (she urged young people to register and vote in 2018 against Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee and endorsed Democrats in down-ballot races); racial justice (she supported Black Lives Matter); gun reform (in 2018 she supported the March For Our Lives campaign, a series of marches organized by the survivors of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S.); anti-discrimination (gave a surprise performance in 2019 at New York’s Stonewall Inn for Pride Day); and #MeToo (Swift became one of the founding signatories of Time’s Up, an advocacy group for survivors of sexual battery, and donated to its legal defense fund). She's also apparently single-handedly responsible for destroying professional football.

In rallying her ... several supporters to vote for Democrats in 2018 in Tennessee, Swift wrote a public statement: “In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now.” She also excoriated Republican Senate hopeful Marsha Blackburn as an enemy of gender equality and LGBTQ rights based on her legislative record. [Miles Klee]

Taylor Swift as avatar warrior for women aside (I'm no Swiftie and pay little attention to celebrity news), the unification of millions of women (let alone the men) behind Kamala Harris,  -- I hate to overstate things right in the middle of a fulmination of passion for justice that ain't nowhere near reaching its zenith -- something monumental is underway and is literally the hope for saying our system.

The MAGA majority are doing their part to add fire to the wrath of women. The whole MAGAverse, it seems, is taking its cues dutifully from Trump and making a big cry about Kamala Harris as "a DEI hire." The message to America (and believe me, the women get it) is that only white men are really eligible for office. Harris has a top notch education, spent years as a prosecutor, was California's attorney general, a U.S. Senator (where her grilling of Brett Kavanaugh became instantly famous), and finally won election to the vice presidency of the United States. The lack of respect for any of that is only a barometer of how badly the enlightened women of America want to punish that viewpoint.

I found great inspiration is what a woman said in Atlanta at that enormous rally Kamala held very recently, about whether what's happening in 2024 resembles the 2008 surge for Obama: “It’s similar in terms of the happiness and the hope that we have, but it’s different because it’s a woman,” she said. “And so I can look at you, you can look at me, and we’re two women, and we get it. I’m telling you something. I go on my walks in the morning, I see women of color, and we just look at each other. And we just smile like, yeah, sis, we got this. We got this.” [Michelle Goldberg]

We all got this.

Just In the Nick of Time

 

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) filed articles of impeachment against Vice President Harris on Tuesday, July 2016.

Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-N.C.) informed us in his email newsletter that Speaker Johnson "didn’t want that to get filed -- and he won’t let it come to a vote -- but he couldn’t hold back one of his members who wanted to capture the media attention for being the first member of Congress to formally call for her impeachment."

Ogles, than which you don't get any more conservative, claimed he was an "economist," a bold lie based on his work as an anti-tax lobbyist with Americans for Prosperity.

Did you get the attention you needed, weirdo?

Cool Cat

 

The Party Unifies

By Jack Yordy, guest-posting:

This past Saturday, July 20th, I went to the North Carolina Democratic Party Unity Dinner, along with 900 delegates, elected officials, staffers, volunteers, donors, and Democrats. The energy at the event was very positive, even before the news of Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race. Democrats at the Unity Dinner were excited. The speakers, including our electric party chair Anderson Clayton, and the formidable former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, energized the crowd and reinforced our commitment to working hard and winning elections in 2024. Unity was the right word to describe the atmosphere. We knew the odds were tough and the road to winning would be hard, but together, we were ready for it.

The very next day, President Joe Biden announced his decision to drop out of the presidential election and the meaning of the word unity changed. Before, we were unified in our determination to beat the odds and fight what many were starting to believe was a losing battle. It was a convicted, resolute, stubborn unity, but not a very hopeful one. Today, we are unified not only in our convictions and fortitude. We are unified in hope. Democrats are feeling reinvigorated. We young Democrats in particular finally have a vision for the future, something to fight toward rather than against. 

The highlighted message of the Republican National Convention last week was that Donald Trump would be a new man, ready to unify the country. Of course, nothing new came from him at the RNC. He is the same man spouting the same hateful rhetoric. Before Biden dropped out of the race, Democrats couldn’t substantively dispute those claims despite Trump’s continued divisiveness. We were airing out all our dirty laundry for the world to see, riddled with panic and division over questions about Joe Biden’s capabilities. Now the Democrats are showing the world how unity is done. 

State delegations, elected officials, power brokers, and grassroots organizers have unified around Vice President Harris. The party is ready to make her the next president of the United States. Not just because we must beat Donald Trump, not just because we must beat Project 2025, but because she is capable of bringing our country into a new era of prosperity, progress, and, yes, unity. 

 

It's a New Day

 

I trust that Democrats will give Joe Biden a hero's send-off at the National Convention on August 19. He saved us from a horrible future in 2020, and he may have just saved us again from the same fate. Self-sacrifice is all too rare in the Age of Trump, and Joe Biden has shown that he's a man of courage and faith in the future. I admire him for the decision, which could not have been easy.

The path forward may prove complicated. I don't know, but our progressive outlook in North Carolina just shot up several points.

Joe Biden Has Less Than a Month To Drop Out

 

Once President Biden is nominated for the presidency by the National Democratic Convention, replacing him on the ballot will be fraught. The delegates will actually vote virtually on his nomination on August 5th, two weeks before the August 19 Convention in Chicago. The WashPost reports that election law experts say that if Biden drops out before he's officially nominated by the party, "replacing him on the ballot would be relatively straightforward." If he waited until after the delegates vote, then all hell could and would break loose.

If Biden were to drop out before delegates vote, then a legal challenge by Republicans to his replacement -- whoever that turned out to be -- would lack standing in the courts, because the decision on who the Democrats choose to run is their decision, not the Republican Party's.

The real problem for Democrats if Biden should wait to drop out until after he's officially nominated are the various ballot deadlines in different states -- the date when ballots have to start being printed. We don't want to go there.

Immediately following the Debate From Hell, I wrote that I wanted an open nominating convention -- let 'er rip and we could count the corpses later. I've changed my mind. Thomas Mills wrote on July 5th a compelling rationale for why Biden's replacement would have to be -- needs to be -- Kamala Harris. And I agree with him. She would strengthen several factions of the Democratic and progressive alliance, especially women and Black voters, and I believe she would help energize the most seriously unenergized portion of our coalition -- young voters.

Mainly, I think, with Kamala we would experience a great surge of relief that we were not doomed -- irrevocably doomed -- to another Trump presidency and that we at least have a fighting chance.

306

 

Daymares or Cloudland on November 3rd

 

I'm about to do what I'm never supposed to do -- get into pointless speculation about our future in politics, the Democratic tribes and their respective throw-weights, if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris actually win today. (What else am I supposed to do on Election Day, when I've already voted and I'm no good on the phone? What else can I do, other than, say, replay compulsively Carly Simon singing "The River Runs"?)

The spaghetti fights that are coming! I'm not thinking of the armed Trumpists. They're someone else's problem. (The internal struggle for control of the Republican Party, if Trump loses, may resemble The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I'll have tourniquets and/or popcorn handy.) No, I'm thinking of the over-caffeinated and not at all demure Democratic activists from left and middle who are going to duke it out over the direction of the Party -- not to mention exert excruciating pressure on the Biden presidency and the presidential initiatives of the Biden/Harris administration.

I'm rumored to be a "progressive Democrat." A Bernie Sanders partisan. A dangerous liberal. Like Trump's working-class white men, my resentments are class based. If it hadn't been for a good education in a little podunk high school in West Texas, followed by more education at a West Texas Baptist college and then even more education at a Mormon-dominated university in Utah, I probably would have grown up stuck like amber on my tenant farmer rung, ambitious without wherewithal, angry and bitter about others moving on up. My resentment might have coagulated into reactionary politics. Saw it happen to plenty of others. 

"Think you're better'n me?" Trump's fan boys want to punch out educated people, media elites, scientists, and professors. 'Cause I am one of those educated people, I deserve punching-out because I've got it good, or at least better, and I'm probably a snob and a gun-control opportunist and an abortion-on-demand destroyer of traditional values. Some of that's true -- not the gun control part (I was actually the author once of a famous bumpersticker: "Democrats Arm Yourselves"), and I ain't no goddamn snob just because I have a vocabulary and read books. I won't apologize for my education, which is actually -- and ironically -- responsible for the loss of my religion. We had a saying at Wayland Baptist College that it produced either preachers or atheists. You got one guess.

But I still identify with my lower- and working-class roots. It's just that I pick Wall Street to hate. I pick smug rich people and bullies and people who cut me off in traffic. I say sometimes that I can't understand the enthusiasm for Trump among rural and working-class folks. But I do understand it. Trump's core base have every reason in the world to hate and cuss someone, anyone, the easy targets supplied by their leader for the supposed "level playing ground" which actually slants like a bitch. They just mistakenly blame their failure to rise on what they see as the privileging of racial minorities, the tyranny of science and Democratic governors, rather than the privileging of the already rich by an economic system whose dogma is: If you ain't got property, you ain't shit.

I want both the progressives and the moderates of my Party, going forward, to be strategic and practical. They won't be. My side will push too hard and at the wrong pressure points. The moderate/conservative, establishment side, which controls the wheels and cogs, will shut down dissent and breed more dissent. Crockery will get broken. Some people will leave the house and slam the door behind them. There could be a third party, or multiple third parties, and I might have trouble resisting the urge to join one. The tectonic plates will shift and buildings will crumble. I'm too old and tired for that additional chaos.

But the Party has got to be bold in standing for the working class against the forces that keep them subservient (and ignorant!). The Party's got to respect their religion and their traditionalism and actually help nurture its future, without simultaneously allowing church to dominate state. Bring broadband to everyone. Is that a middle way or a progressive way? Regulate assault weapons and atomic bombs but leave the household arsenals alone. Decriminalize a lot of petty offenses that catch up the most vulnerable and the most uneducated. Do not be jerks. Stop insulting and stereotyping those who are less. Stop the pity, too, because pity always runs downhill.

Bonus version:

And another, because that song needs -- demands -- a choir of young people:

Kamala Harris Announcement Speech

I'm not jumping on any candidate's bandwagon yet, but this roll-out by Kamala Harris yesterday in Oakland is worth watching for the message and for the personality of a candidate who will have wide and deep appeal.

Watching Kamala Harris

Sen. Kamala Harris has published an old-fashioned book, a "campaign biography," the sort of book that candidates for US president used to write back when people used to read. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of Franklin Pierce in 1852, claiming that Pierce was uniquely qualified to be president. How did that work out?

Reviews of Harris's “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey” have not been particularly good nor encouraging. "A meandering work that lacks verve," said The Atlantic reviewer. "A rather clear attempt by Harris to preemptively defend her record on criminal justice, which has emerged as an important issue, especially on the left flank of the Democratic Party," said another, dredging up several instances when Harris defended prosecutorial misconduct as Attorney General of California.

I haven't read her campaign biography and don't plan to. (I'm too busy reading about "The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs" and "The Wisdom of Wolves.") But I'm taking note of her aborning candidacy because she's been such a badass in the US Senate. She's an appealing figure and could break out of the pack (a wolf pack, you might call it), and she'll have to deal with those parts of her record that cause doubts.

I'm on that jury, and so far this jury is out.

Kamala Harris Would Make a Hell of a Chief Executive

I've been impressed by Sen. Kamala Harris since I watched her dismantle Attorney General Jeff Sessions -- "You're making me nervous," he whined at her on June 13, 2017. Mr. Chicken who couldn't remember scratch is gone, but Senator Harris has risen as a possible presidential contender.





She's obviously a skilled prosecutor and has the history of study and public office to prove it. She got her law degree from the University of California's Hastings College of Law and got her feet wet as an attorney for the City of San Francisco, then ran successfully for district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco in 2003. In 2009, Harris wrote Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer in which (according to Wikipedia) "she looked at criminal justice from an economic perspective and attempted to reduce temptation and access for criminals" (the love of filthy lucre being the root of all evil, yes and amen!).

She ain't no bleeding heart: "While Harris was the San Francisco District Attorney, the overall felony conviction rate rose from 52% in 2003 to 67% in 2006, the highest in a decade .... convictions of drug dealers increased from 56% in 2003 to 74% in 2006." Conviction rate for homicides went up too, though Harris is strong against the death penalty. Life in prison for cold-blooded murderers is adequate for her.

In 2010, Harris ran for and was elected Attorney General of California, winning the Democratic primary in a crowded field. She got more than twice the votes as her nearest competitor. She was reelected attorney general in 2014. After Senator Barbara Boxer announced her retirement, Harris ran for her Senate seat and won in 2016. She's in her first term.

She is in every way imaginable the very image of the new America. Child of immigrants from Jamaica and India, well educated and instinctually smart, she's a crusader. She participated in a suit against five big California banks over the sub-prime mortgage crisis and secured over $12 billion in debt reduction for bamboozled homeowners.

She has an interesting history with DJT's Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin: In 2013, she did not prosecute his bank OneWest despite evidence "suggestive of widespread misconduct," according to a leaked memo from the Department of Justice. In 2017, Harris said that her office's decision to not prosecute Mnuchin was based on "following the facts and the evidence ... like any other case." Here's where eyebrows really started going north: In 2016, Mnuchin donated $2,000 to Harris's senate campaign. Then this inexplicably happened: as senator, Harris voted against the confirmation of Mnuchin to become Twitterman's Secretary of the Treasury.

If she runs for president, that curious history will be mined. Anyone as involved in public policy implementation as Kamala Harris will have loads of decisions subject to investigation and opposition research ... if she runs for president. (She's supposed to announce her decision early in 2019.)

Here's more of Harris as a senator on the Judiciary Committee, questioning Rod Rosenstein about protecting the independence of special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigation -- all more than relevant now in light of the temporary head of the Department of Justice that Twitterman put in Sessions' place and in light of the dude Twitterman has nominated as his permanent replacement for Attorney General of the United States.





I'd pay money to see her in a debate with the biggest damned ignorant fool on the planet (and you know who I'm talking about!).