Kamala and some Trump and ...

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

– Cormac McCarthy

+ Kamala Harris’s vow at the DNC to make sure that the US will always possess the “most lethal fighting force in the world” struck a familiar, if ominous, chord.  Ken Kilippenstein looked the phrase up and found that the only other politicians to have used it were Republicans.

+ Why there was no mention of an arms embargo at the DNC, even though more than 60% of all voters and nearly 80% of Democrats say the US shouldn’t send arms to Israel? The leading 15 weapons contractors are forecast to log a cash flow of $52 billion in 2026 — almost double their combined cash flow at the end of 2021.

+ Though I shouldn’t be, I’m still mildly shocked that over four nights of prime-time speakers at the DNC only one mentioned the anti-genocide protest and it wasn’t AOC, Bernie, Warnock, Oprah, Raskin or Shawn Fain but Joe “Friggin” Biden, who at least admitted, “They have a point.

+ The DNC quietly dropped any mention of “torture” from its platform.

+ Former top Italian diplomat Marcos Carnelos:  “The US, not China, is threatening the rules-based world order. US foreign policy failures have inflicted untold misery worldwide for decades, while Beijing is now achieving tangible results.”

+ For the first time in more than 10 years, the Democratic Party platform included no mention of eliminating the death penalty.

+ True to form, Trump has now taken to calling Kamala Harris “low IQ” and “stupid,” racist tropes he draws on whenever he’s confronted by minorities, women or both. But for all her faults, Harris isn’t stupid. In fact, she’s demonstrated her ability to swiftly master and deftly deploy the finer points of Clintonian triangulation, the strategy of political bait-and-switch that prioritizes running against the core issues held by her own party, even policies she once enthusiastically promoted as signature features of her own previous campaigns. Pulling this off required some pretty adroit political gymnastics, where Harris had to completely reverse herself without showing the strain over long-held positions on fracking, immigration, asylum, a human rights-based foreign policy, student loan forgiveness, torture, the death penalty, and a single-payer health care system. But she sold these policy retreats so smoothly that the Democratic base eagerly embraced her politics of joyful austerity and genocide with a smile.

+ If Alexander Cockburn had lived to see Katrina (publisher/former editor of The Nation) post this, he wouldn’t have needed to use one of his six phones to ring me up. I would have heard him let loose all the way from the Lost Coast to Oregon City…

+ I don’t follow fashion protocols that closely, but is it even permissible to wear white while you do a genocide?

+ In his book The Viral Underclass, Steven Thrasher revealed how when Kamala Harris was AG of California she exploited the use of enslaved prison labor to fight wildfires in California: “In 2011, the US Supreme Court ruled that California had to reduce its dangerously overcrowded prisons by granting early release to people convicted of nonviolent offenses. Then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris sued in 2014 to stop these court-mandated releases. By using cheaply paid, enslaved firefighters, California was saving one hundred million dollars a year and Harris’s office argued that it would be too “dangerous” to let these firefighters go–not because they would pose a danger to their communities, but because it would be “a difficult fire season” without enslaved labor.”

+ This week more than 200 former aides to George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney announced their support for Kamala Harris, ensuring that if Harris is elected she will preside over the 12th consecutive iteration of the Reagan Administration.

+ In her acceptance speech, Harris mentioned the border seven times, while saying “climate change” and “health care” only once each.

+ Harris in 2019: “We should do something about the actual emergencies that plague our nation — like climate change or health care access — not playing politics in order to build a wasteful border wall.” Harris is turning flip-flopping into an Olympic sport, just in time for LA to host the next summer games.

+ You could’ve surprised me, but apparently there aren’t enough neocons in the Democratic Party to fill her cabinet, so she’s going to recruit some from across the aisle.

+ Place your bets! Will it be Liz Cheney? John Bolton? Elliott Abrams? John Yoo? One of the Bush twins?

+ This was the big news coming out of Harris’ first post-convention interview. Of course, Obama tried this bi-partisan offering with predictably disastrous results when he retained the Iran/contra-linked Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, even though HRC was more than willing to fuck up his foreign policy all by herself.

+ Harris says she hasn’t changed her values, just her positions, which is the Gen X (honorary member) variation on HRC’s “One position in public, another in private” and Kerry’s “I was for the war before I was against it.”

+ Trump: “Comrade Kamala will obliterate Social Security and Medicare by giving it away to the Millions of Illegal Immigrants who are infiltrating our Country!” Most undocumented workers pay into both and receive no benefits. The surest way to wreck Social Security and Medicare is a mass deportation scheme targeting undocumented workers.

+ The Trump campaign is now arguing that their own candidate’s mic should be muted at the next debate…

+ Ralph Nader: “Take the promises ‘for the people’ by Kamala Harris with a grain of salt. Even if sincere, she knows the realities of a corporate Congress and a corporate Supreme Court. Consider the emphatic promise by Joe Biden in 2020: “No more drilling on federal lands. Period. Period. Period. Period.” Now, the Washington Post reports: “The Biden administration has now outpaced the Trump administration in approving permits for drilling on public lands.” Period!”

+ I’ve been thinking about Hurricane Katrina this week and was reminded of this sign from the Ninth Ward of New Orleans and how little has changed in the priorities of our country…

+++

+ Shortly after receiving the surprise endorsement of the Phoenix Police Union, Rep. Rueben Gallegos, running for US senate in Arizona against MAGA-fixture Kari Lake, Gallego, sent a letter to the US Department of Justice asking them to call off its investigations against the Phoenix police and its effort to bring the department under a consent decree.

+ RIP Phil Donahue…I learned more from The Phil Donahue Show about how American society really works (and who it works for and against) than 60 Minutes or Face the Nation.

+ Donahue on getting fired from MSDNC: “Well, I think what happened to me, the biggest lesson, I think, is … how the corporate media shapes our opinions and our coverage..The decision to release me came from far above. This was not an assistant program director who decided to separate me from MSNBC. They were terrified of the antiwar voice. And that is not an overstatement. Antiwar voices were not popular. And if you’re General Electric, you certainly don’t want an antiwar voice on a cable channel that you own. Donald Rumsfeld is your biggest customer. So, by the way, I had to have conservatives on for every liberal. I could have Richard Perle on alone, but I couldn’t have Dennis Kucinich on alone. I was considered too liberal. It really is funny almost, when you look back on how the management was just frozen by the antiwar voice. We were scolds. We weren’t patriotic. American people disagreed with us. And we weren’t good for business.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/30/roaming-charges-genocide-with-a-smile/