FYI: How this works First off, by the schedule of convention events and the fact that I lose an hour of morning blogging time (Central vs. Eastern) I’m unlikely to be posting in this space from August 19-23. I am a delegate from North Carolina to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I attended the 2012 convention in Charlotte on a press pass. This year’s experience will be very different. Before President Joe Biden dropped out, I’d expected to be an extra at a four-day infomercial. This feels much more monumental. For you who’ve ever thought about being a national convention delegate, a few things I’ve picked up. Becoming a delegate: Every cycle, random callers tell us they’d like to be convention delegates. Doesn’t that sound like fun? They have no clue how this works. Delegates pledged to a candidate and vetted by the campaign(s) are elected by Democrats active in your congressional district. Or you must be an elected official or party insider to win a delegate slot. I am one of five pledged delegates elected from my district. Others are elected at large at state conventions.
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Byron Donalds is slick but not that slick: Good for Stephanopoulos for pushing back but it’s like talking to a wall. These people will never concede … anything. By the way, the AP headline Donalds refers to said that Harris was the first Indian American Senator because she was. She was not the first Black Senator which is why they didn’t mention that she was Black. It makes me feel crazy that we have to make that clear. Which is the point.
If you are wondering where JD Vance, Elon Musk et al are getting their creepy ideas, they stem from one very creepy guy: In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.” He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.” Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president.
There is only Trump and his grievances This is self-destructive and stupid but he just can’t help himself: Just before rallying supporters in Atlanta on Saturday, Trump unleashed a tirade on the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, whose vaunted ground game operation Trump may need in November, ripping into him on Truth Social for “fighting Unity and the Republican Party.” And when Trump took the stage, he went at him even harder. “He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy and he’s a very average governor,” Trump told supporters, eliciting boos toward Kemp from the crowd. The attack — on social media and in person at the Georgia State University Convocation Center — marked an escalation of Trump’s longstanding criticism of Kemp. And it instantly unsettled Georgia Republicans, who warned Trump’s comments threaten his already shaky prospects in the state. “I’m sitting here scratching my head,” Bobby Saparow, a Republican operative and Brian Kemp’s former campaign manager, told POLITICO. “Attacking the popular governor of a pivotal swing state makes zero sense.
Watching Trump the last few days it’s been obvious to me that he’s stressed and upset about the race. He didn’t get any kind of bump from his assassination attempt and the RNC which was no doubt a huge shock to him. (Hubris is his middle name, after all.) The new polls show Kamala now slightly ahead with momentum and it’s driving him crazy. Here’s a report from inside the campaign: Two weeks ago, Donald Trump was riding high, envisioning a landslide victory against Joe Biden after beating an assassination attempt, briefly proclaiming himself to be a new man, and enjoying a drama-free convention that felt like an early victory party. Days later, of course, Biden euthanized his campaign, elevating his vice president as his presumptive replacement and definitively resetting the table.
CBS has a new one and it shows that Harris has made up the ground Biden lost but it’s still looking like hand to hand combat… for now, anyway: Boosted by Democrats, younger and Black voters becoming more engaged and likely to vote, and by women decidedly thinking she’d favor their interests more, Vice President Kamala Harris has reset the 2024 presidential race. She has a 1-point edge nationally — something President Biden never had (he was down by 5 points when he left the race) — and Harris and former President Donald Trump are tied across the collective battleground states. Looking ahead, voters are also defining why the next few weeks could be critical. On one hand, Harris has additional edges with the wider electorate that Mr. Biden did not: she’s leading Trump on being seen as having the cognitive health to serve, a measure that was of course central to the campaign before Mr. Biden stepped aside. And on policy generally, Harris is seen as a little different from Mr.
Harris campaign picks up speed and voters Democrats’ switcheroo on presidential candidates is turning more than Republican and pundit heads. On top of polling showing Vice President Kamala Harris picking up support among Black voters, The New Republic has a scoop this morning regarding growing support for Harris among Latino voters: Harris leads Trump by 55 percent to 37 percent in the head-to-head finding, which sampled 800 Latinos across Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina. The survey—provided to The New Republic in advance of its release on Monday—was conducted July 23-26, well after Biden stepped aside on July 21. The poll dovetails with other national polls finding similar advantages for Harris among Latino voters. But, significantly, the larger Latino sample size in the survey—commissioned by the voter engagement group Somos PAC and conducted by Latino pollster Gary Segura—provides a stronger basis for confidence that Harris’s lead among Hispanics is real.
I wrote a piece for The New Yorker on America’s latest passion project: the Jew. My first and only experience of antisemitism in America came wrapped in a bow of care and concern. In 1993, I spent the summer in Tennessee with my girlfriend. At a barbecue, we were peppered with questions. What brought us south? How were we getting on? Where did we go to church? We explained that we didn’t go to church because we were Jewish. “That’s O.K.,” a woman reassured us. Having never thought that it wasn’t, I flashed a puzzled smile and recalled an observation of the German writer Ludwig Börne: “Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me […]
You’re the weirdo! The man is basically appearing in blackface with a bird’s nest on his head. His running mate has declared war on women with cats. MAGA is a total freakshow. But sure…
Baby penguin! There are few certainties in life, but alongside death, taxes, and the arrival of hot weather in July, at least one other thing is inarguable: baby penguins are almost impossibly cute. Guests visiting the Tennessee Aquarium during the Fourth of July holiday can join Aquarium staffers in excitedly welcoming the newest addition to the Penguins’ Rock gallery — a fluffy (and shockingly fast-growing) Macaroni Penguin chick. The chick hatched on June 2 from an egg laid in late April by parents Bacon and Merlin. This baby bird is the first offspring ever produced by Bacon, who hatched in 2015 to two other Aquarium penguins, Hercules and Little Debbie. Though Little Debbie now lives at another facility, the newest chick’s grandsire, Hercules, still calls Penguins’ Rock home. With this latest arrival, the Aquarium is home for the first time ever to three generations of Macaroni Penguins. The new chick is the Aquarium’s first hatchling since the 2021 arrival of Carla, a Gentoo Penguin. This latest baby is the first Macaroni Penguin chick since Pedro hatched in 2019.