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| The Bidens after his diagnosis was announced (NBC) |
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| 2020 election: plenty of space |
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| Tyrus gesticulates |
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| (Atlanta Journal-Constitution photo) |
Vice President Kamala Harris started her Sunday at services at the Church of Christian Compassion in West Philadelphia. She told the largely Black congregation that the “next nine days will test us—they will demand everything we’ve got.”Vice President Harris is also trying to counter the anti-Christian impression of her "you guys are at the wrong rally" riposte when hecklers shouted "Jesus is Lord" and "Christ is King." (Her campaign asserts that she was responding to cries of "Lies! Lies! Lies!").
“In this moment, we do face a real question: What kind of country do we want to live in? A country of chaos, fear and hate, or a country of freedom, justice, and compassion?” Harris asked, adding, “The great thing about living in a democracy is we, the people, have the choice to answer that question.” Harris is spending the day in the Philadelphia area as polls show a tight race in Pennsylvania, the nation’s largest battleground state.
We can give you copies or printouts of your Forms W-2 for any year from 1978 to the present. You can get free copies if you need them for a Social Security-related reason. But there is a fee of $62 per request if you need them for an unrelated reason. You can also get a transcript or copy of your Form W-2 from the Internal Revenue Service. However, state and local tax information isn’t available if you e-filed your tax return.How tough would it be for Kamala Harris to request a copy of her 1983 W-2 from the SSA or IRS and put the matter to rest? The fact that she hasn't done so is a strong indicator that she did not work at McDonald's, but of course yours truly is just a simple accountant who knows nothing about the subtlety of politics.
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| P. kamalaharrisae (Balukjian photo) |
Across the tree of life, approximately 18,000 new species are described by taxonomists every year. One of the perks of the work is getting to name them. My colleagues and I can have a lot of fun with it — there’s a genus of spiders named for the band ABBA and a wasp named after Jackie Chan.Brad Balukjian named the bug after Vice President Harris to honor her support of climate change policies (MAGA - "Making America Green Again").
Today, one of my naming decisions makes its official debut: a bright green, red, and yellow plant bug will now be known as Pseudoloxops kamalaharrisae.
Yes, I named a bug after our vice-president and yes, it is meant as a massive compliment.
Harris’ six-legged namesake is part of a remarkable radiation of closely related plant bugs endemic to the islands of Tahiti, where I did my Ph.D. research over a decade ago. Plant bugs are a type of true bug; although we colloquially call anything small and scurrying a “bug,” it’s actually a technical term, referring to insects in the suborder Heteroptera, which have mouths like a straw. While some plant bugs are agricultural pests, P. kamalaharrisae and its cousins hang out on brightly colored flowers all day slurping plant slushees and hoping to avoid detection by birds.
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| Dermophis donaldtrumpi (Abel Batista / Rainforest Trust) |
The Dermophis donaldtrumpi, which was discovered in Panama, was named by the head of a company that had bid $25,000 (£19,800) at auction for the privilege.Politics infests everything, even the naming of newly discovered species.
The company said it wanted to raise awareness about climate change.
"[Dermophis donaldtrumpi] is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesake's climate policies," said EnviroBuild co-founder Aidan Bell in a statement.
The small, blind, creature is a type of caecilian that primarily lives underground, and Mr Bell drew an unflattering comparison between its behaviour and Mr Trump's.
"Burrowing [his] head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropomorphic climate change," he wrote.
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| Cheryl Obermiller in Missouri, and Jonathan Chiaramonte in New York. Both started politics-free Facebook groups. (WSJ photo) |
Some Americans are avoiding [politics] at all costs.Count me in the feigning-ignorance crowd. Stress harms one's mental and physical health. Our jobs, finances, and family problems are stressors enough, and voluntarily seeking more in political discussions seems crazy to your humble blogger.
They are canceling subscriptions, deleting apps, silencing notifications and unfollowing rabble-rousers. Many want no part of Tuesday night’s presidential debate or its fallout. Political discourse has infiltrated everything from the Sunday church service to afternoon football, and they have had enough.
Even those with firm political views say they feign ignorance rather than join impassioned discussions. It isn’t, they say, that they are uninterested or uncaring about world events, but they are inundated by the sheer volume of news headlines. Deciding it is bad for their mental health, they are retreating or seeking apolitical havens.
Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Group, with 11,600 members, is one. “Not only do I not care who you voted for, in this group you aren’t allowed to tell me,” wrote creator Cheryl Obermiller, 66 years old, welcoming “fellow snowflakes” to post photos of flowers, funny road signs and tasteful jokes.
Obermiller, who founded the group after friends engaged in political flame wars, said, “Things are so contentious right now that people are just starving for a place they can go where someone doesn’t have to know who I am going to vote for.” She helps monitor comments, a time-consuming task for the Kansas City, Mo., construction-services firm owner with eight children and 21 grandchildren.
About 62% of U.S. adults say they are worn out by so much coverage of the campaign and candidates, according to the Pew Research Center, which surveyed 8,709 adults in April...
Politics is a chronic stressor and disengaging is among the most effective coping methods, said Brett Q. Ford, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Ford and a colleague tracked hundreds of Americans in recent years and found political events often triggered negative emotions that left people exhausted...
Jonathan Chiaramonte, a 43-year-old high-school teacher, in 2020 started a politics-free community Facebook group in Sayville, N.Y., where he lives. Chiaramonte, who teaches a peer-education class that promotes community, confidence and eradicating bullying, noticed adults in town behaved worse than his students when it came to political discourse. “It was so upsetting to see my neighbors fighting,” he recalled.
Today, the Sayville Politics-Free Zone has 3,000 members in a town of about 17,000. He said people know they can share or seek information without any spin or political blowback. He once used the forum while redoing his kitchen. “I was looking for a contractor,” he said, “not for a lecture on politics.”
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| The 2.800 sq. ft. home was the property of Gene Wilder. Elon Musk sold it to Wilder's nephew. |
In 2020, tech mogul Elon Musk agreed to sell one of his Los Angeles homes to filmmaker Jordan Walker-Pearlman and his wife, Elizabeth Hunter, for $7 million. Walker-Pearlman had grown up in the Bel-Air house—the longtime home of his uncle, the late “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” actor Gene Wilder—and Musk agreed to loan the couple most of the money they would need to buy it.The facts, as noted in the article:
“He could have sold it for so much more,” Walker-Pearlman, a film director and writer, told The Wall Street Journal in 2022. “His sensitivity to me can’t be overstated.”
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| Jean Hagen and Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain |
Movie buffs often look for a film that catches the political moment. Before Joe Biden dropped out, it might have been “The Last Hurrah” (1958). Now it’s “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), a picture about the emergence of the “talkies” in the mid-1920s, when sound was added to films.In real life Jean Hagen was an excellent actress who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Singin'.
The shock came when glamorous figures suddenly had to speak and, in some cases, their voices and accents made the audience cringe. The captivating siren, threatened with exposure in “Singin’ in the Rain,” is the invincible, unteachable Lina Lamont. In the movie, Lina is played by the veteran Jean Hagen, but the turnabout comes in our own politics, where she is played by Kamala Harris.
Or rather, Ms. Harris is now our Lina Lamont, who must be carefully guarded by her handlers and barred from speaking, for her own good (and that of the Democratic Party). That her managers have kept her shielded and confined to scripted performances confirms their own judgment that she simply isn’t up to it.
In “Singin’ in the Rain,” Lina’s songs are dubbed while she lip-synchs. Ms. Harris can make the sounds; the point of resemblance is that the words aren’t hers. So it was, one might say, for all presidents between Herbert Hoover and Barack Obama. Calvin Coolidge used to plead that he had to decline so many invitations to speak because he didn’t have the time to do the research. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speechwriter Sam Rosenman knew the style and sensibility of the patrician figure for whom he was trying to write. With Ms. Harris, there is no fixed persona or style, confirmed in writing and speech. She is something for her writers to invent.
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| She can think on her feet. WaPo reminds us that she weathered the SF crime lab scandal in 2010. |
The San Francisco attacks will be potent. The city has long had a national image problem, and it’s not just people who don’t live in the city who feel that way; poll after poll from recent years shows San Franciscans themselves believe the city is on the wrong track. There’s a reason this year’s leading mayoral candidates are accusing one another of copying their policy proposals on police staffing and public safety.The editorialist, Eric Ting, proposes a plausible defense against future Republican attack ads against San Francisco. Ms. Harris can say, look at the mess it became when I departed, my successors went too far left, and my policies will restore it.
But Harris could take a course of action that would not only parry the attacks but also help solve another problem she has. She can throw San Francisco — the city where she launched her career in electoral politics — under the bus.
Let’s back up. Harris has two major weaknesses to overcome if she wants to win the White House. The first is the issue that is, frankly, San Francisco. Harris’ national ascent started in San Francisco, when she became the city’s district attorney in 2004; her mantra that she can “prosecute the case against Donald Trump” is her directly campaigning on her tenure in the city. The problem is people across the political spectrum now view the city as a wasteland of needles, vacant storefronts and cars with shattered windows.
The second is the fact that Harris is a career political shapeshifter, and that shapeshifting — specifically her attempts to cater to the progressive wing of her party in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries — has left her exposed to attacks that she’s a radical leftist who wants to defund the police and weaken enforcement against illegal immigration. Early polling confirms that Harris’ biggest issue is that she's perceived as too liberal. This week, she named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a gun owner and hunter who used to represent a rural congressional district, as her running mate, reportedly in part because of his possible appeal to rural and exurban areas that traditionally vote Republican.
Throwing San Francisco under the bus helps Harris with both weaknesses. She is already stylizing herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor and someone who is more of an immigration hawk than Trump. She should more specifically portray herself as the last non-radical San Francisco district attorney. She has a set of spinnable facts that can tell the story of San Francisco’s demise and how it was not because of her but rather despite her. It’s because of her departure (she left to become California’s attorney general in 2011) that San Francisco went to s—t, she can say. After all, her two successors, George Gascón and Chesa Boudin, are now national bogeymen with name ID for anyone who has watched even five minutes of Fox News while visiting their grandma for a holiday.
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| Bob Casey and Josh Shapiro (WSJ photo) |
Bob Casey Sr. was one of the most prominent Catholic Democrats of his time. He was also a proven vote-getter in a key state. In 1990 he won his second term as Pennsylvania’s governor by a margin of more than 2 to 1 and carried every county in the state but one.Christianity has been a whipping boy--not without justification--through most of American history. From the Salem witch trials to Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, from the Scopes monkey trial to the current pro-Life movement, Christianity has been vilified as a white, patriarchal religion. (The key role of Christians in the abolitionist movement is ignored or played down.)
Yet in 1992 his party didn’t permit him to deliver a speech at its national convention. The problem: Casey wanted to express his pro-life views. The snub came to symbolize the left’s turn away from Catholics, who had once been dependable supporters. While today’s party still includes prominent communicants—including Joe Biden and Sen. Bob Casey Jr.—they have found it necessary to abandon their support for unborn life.
Perhaps Gov. Josh Shapiro’s fate is a sign of a similar turning point. When Kamala Harris on Tuesday announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, some worried she’d passed over Mr. Shapiro because he’s Jewish and Zionist, much as Casey was slighted for being Catholic and pro-life.
Mr. Shapiro is remarkably popular in Pennsylvania, an even more crucial state now than in 1992. His public acts—from spearheading a grand-jury report on sex abuse in the Catholic Church as state attorney general to making a conciliatory statement after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump—have revealed sure political instincts.
Yet many on the left were scandalized that he was on Ms. Harris’s shortlist. They viewed his support for Israel as disqualifying. Activists have labeled the governor—who attends Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, Pa., and has sent his children to Jewish day school—“Genocide Josh” owing to his criticism of anti-Israel protest mobs and the boycott, divest and sanctions movement. Critics have also pointed to a 1993 college newspaper article that described Palestinians as “too battle-minded” to coexist with Israel.
Mr. Shapiro, who has disavowed that column, holds views that were mainstream within the Democratic Party until very recently. He supports the Jewish state’s right to defend itself but has denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “one of the worst leaders of all time” and accused him of making Israel “less safe.” That isn’t exactly hard-edged Zionism, but some nonetheless perceived Mr. Shapiro as too extreme.
Former President Donald Trump attacked Vice President Kamala Harris over her race, baselessly suggesting his election rival only began identifying as a Black woman in recent years.Following the interview (PBS / YouTube at the bottom of this post), partisans leapt immediately into the fray attacking and defending President Trump's answers to various questions, with the main focus on whether Vice President Harris self-identified as "Black" or "Indian". There are videos supporting both positions, but my own take is that this contretemps will blow over when the Democratic convention begins on August 19th.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said Wednesday at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention. “So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?”
He continued: “I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person. And I think somebody should look into that, too.”
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| (Image via Opindia / YouTube) |
The New York Times kicked off the kicking with a story quoting various progressive sages suddenly admitting what everyone has known all along: Mr. Biden is the oldest serving U.S. President at age 79, and he’ll be 82 when he finishes his term. He looks and sounds every bit his age. This declaration of the obvious has now moved along the progressive media chorus line to the Atlantic, with a piece that asserts “Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for re-election in 2024. He is too old.”California's governor---handsome, young (57 when he takes office in 2025), Washington outsider, liberal but not woke--checks off the WSJ's boxes. True, the governor will have to explain why following California's energy policy was the reason gasoline prices have doubled nationwide, and why more people are fleeing the State than entering it, but at least he can give a much more coherent answer than the current incumbent.
These stories treat this as a revelation, as if Mr. Biden suddenly showed some dramatic decline. The truth is that the President demonstrated he had lost a verbal, and maybe mental, step in the first Democratic candidate debate in 2019. He hasn’t improved. Democrats admitted it privately at the time, but they rallied to him during the South Carolina primary when it looked like he was the only Democrat who could hold off the nomination of Bernie Sanders and defeat Donald Trump.
The rest of the campaign was a long apologia for Mr. Biden’s strategy of limiting his public exposure by campaigning in his Delaware basement. Covid-19 was the perfect excuse, and woe to any journalist who dared to ask if Mr. Biden wasn’t the same man we knew as Vice President. The subject was taboo.
This was one of the great free campaign passes in history. Ronald Reagan’s age was a subject of agonized media concern when he ran for President at age 69 in 1980. He was roasted after he stumbled in the first debate against Walter Mondale in 1984, and he had to defuse the media and public doubts with a quip about Mondale’s “youth and inexperience” in the next debate.
The Gipper was three weeks shy of 78 when he left office, which was younger than Mr. Biden was when he entered the Oval. If the President runs and serves a second term, he’d be 86 on his final day in the job. But Mr. Biden was needed to defeat Mr. Trump, and so all of this age business had to be ignored in 2020.
Why the Democratic turn now? One obvious answer is that the President is down in the polls, and his low approval rating may cost Democrats control of Congress in November. The problem can’t be the party’s ideas, or Mr. Biden’s adoption of the Sanders agenda after he’d campaigned as a moderate. The problem has to be Mr. Biden. He’s suddenly not up to the burdens of the Oval Office that have aged even younger men. He can’t make the case for his ideas. He’s overwhelmed by crises.
You almost have to feel sorry for Mr. Biden, who saved his party from Mr. Trump but is expendable now that he’s a political liability. You can almost hear Mr. Biden shouting at his staff: Where’s the gratitude? You think Bernie or Mayor Pete would have beaten Trump? I’m the guy who saved democracy.
Mr. Biden can be stubborn, and as anyone with older parents knows, taking away their car keys can be a difficult conversation. The President may not want to leave town as easily as some Democrats want him to.
All the more given the lack of obvious Democratic alternatives to Mr. Biden in 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris would run in a millisecond, but nothing she has done or said since her emergence on the national scene suggests she is up to the Presidency.
Democrats know this, which you can tell by all the stories earlier this year about her political struggles. That’s the Beltway insider way of preparing the field for other candidates to consider running. Not that Pete Buttigieg will need any coaxing.
The obvious candidate "far from Washington"
Such is the price of nominating Mr. Biden with so little scrutiny about his capacity for the Presidency. Perhaps Democrats will avoid a drubbing in the midterms, or he’ll rally after the election by using a GOP Congress as a foil. But Democrats may want to begin looking for candidates far from Washington if they want to retain the White House in 2024.
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| Kamala Harris, husband Doug Emhoff, and step- children Cole and Emma Emhoff (Chron photo) |
Harris is also a mother, affectionately known as “Momala,” to two now-adult stepchildren with husband Douglas Emhoff, whom she married in 2014 when she was California attorney general.The article goes on with nary a discouraging word. I was surprised, however, about all the references to motherhood given the Biden Administration's renaming "mothers" as birthing persons.
That has meant her own juggling of career and family, including a high-profile Senate hearing that conflicted with her stepdaughter’s high school graduation.
Experts say this is one of the subtle but powerful ways that Harris is changing politics by virtue of being the first person like her in her position — including the first mother elected on a presidential ticket, as well as the first woman and woman of color. And, they say, it couldn’t be more timely.
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| "The apartment is on the top floor of a boutique building in the city’s SOMA neighborhood." (WSJ) |
The property had been on the market for just over a week asking $799,000, according to listings website Zillow. Listing agent Anne Herrera of Sotheby’s International Realty confirmed that the property was in contract but didn’t comment further.The Vice President and Second Gentleman Doug Emhof have the condo in San Francisco, a condo in Washington, and a home in Brentwood.
The apartment, on the top floor of a boutique building in the city’s SOMA neighborhood, is about 1,069 square feet spread over two levels, the listing shows. There is a main floor living and dining space with high-ceilings, a home office alcove and a small outdoor space as well as a loft level with a bedroom, a bathroom and a walk-in closet.
Ms. Harris bought the apartment for $489,000 in 2004, records show, the year she began serving as California’s first Black district attorney. The unit is about a mile’s walk from the San Francisco Superior Court House.
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| (WSJ photo) |
Mr. Emhoff’s honorific uses “gentleman” as the male counterpart to “lady” in the traditional titles of “First Lady” and “Second Lady” for the wives of the president and vice president, respectively. But while his formal designation may be new, it’s built on centuries of linguistic etiquette.Words, specifically references to men and women, have been one of the flashpoints of the culture wars. Lady and gentleman are terms that still carry with them the "whiff of their aristocratic background despite the country’s ostensibly egalitarian spirit" and are not tainted with historical baggage like, for example, master and mistress.
“Gentleman” itself dates back to around 1200 in English, originally modeled on the French equivalent, “gentilhomme.”
“Gentle” originally meant “belonging to a good, upstanding family,” from Latin “gentilis,” meaning “of the same family or clan.” The title was used for a man in the lower tier of respectability—one whose family was not ranked with the nobility yet was still entitled to a coat of arms.
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| Screenshot of tweet with red circles added |
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| SF on Wednesday: it's not the fog. (Chron) |
Firefighters may face increased risk of contracting the coronavirus while living and working in close quarters on the front lines. In hospitals and evacuation shelters across the region, people suffering smoke exposure may have symptoms that could be confused for COVID-19, complicating care and draining resources.Adding to the constant chaos [not a hyperbolic description of the way things are, per Democratic VP Nominee Kamala Harris] is the confusion from government officials: [bold added]
“These are all cascading catastrophes. We’re looking at the consequences of these overlapping emergencies,” said Dr. Matt Willis, the Marin County health officer. “We had been concerned there might be a fire here or there. And now we’re dealing with fires everywhere. And while we’re still seeing all this viral transmission.”
And on top of it all, everyone’s exhausted...
In a pandemic, people are told that outdoor activities are better than inside. But with smoke choking the region, everyone’s being told to stay inside now. People evacuated from their homes often are urged to stay with friends or relatives if they can. But that’s not necessarily a wise choice now, either, when the pandemic message is to avoid others.Don't count on the government to save us or our homes. It's paralyzed by indecision and is spewing conflicting advice in all directions. It also lacks resources; across Northern California Cal Fire is hoping the fires burn themselves out.
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| At the Houston debates last September (Chron/AP) |
I got a call from a guy who interviewed me when I was in Dallas for my sister’s funeral in January 2019.Willie Brown rose to the top of Sacramento politics as California's Speaker, then glided through two terms (1996-2004) as mayor of San Francisco before its recent troubles. He's found his calling as the still-stylish political raconteur with friends on both sides of the aisle. He was lucky that day when he made the call, but he has a lot of lucky days.
“I asked you what you thought the ideal Democratic ticket would be, and you said, ‘Biden for president. Kamala Harris for VP.’ I even have it on tape,” he said.
“Play if for me,” I said.
He did.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think that was my lucky day. I just wish you had asked me to pick that day’s lottery number.”
Here’s hoping your day is lucky as well.
