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US Presidential Election 2024 - Trump vs Harris - Vote Hard with a Vengence

You say this like a trump victory is a done deal ;)
It was clear that he would win against Biden, it's to bad for Trump, that Biden didn't hang in longer. KH may win, so far I think they stemmed the leaks from the DNC, it remains to be seen if she can convince the undecided that what she represent (the current economic Status Quo) is worth holding onto. Trump is likley to lose if he keeps it personal, if he attacks their performance record, he stands a good chance to win.
 
This, from the Globe and Mail, without further comment other than to say, again, that William Tecumseh Sherman was right:

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At the DNC, doctors working in Gaza push to move American policy away from long-standing support of Israel​

Tanya Haj-Hassan pauses for a moment as she casts her mind back to the boy, maybe eight or nine, who arrived at the hospital in Gaza with a double femoral fracture, an injury that produces pain so searing it is automatically treated with morphine.

When she asked the Palestinian health care workers at her side, they told Dr. Haj-Hassan, a specialist in pediatric intensive care, they had nothing to ease the suffering. The fractures would have to be treated without pain relief.

In Gaza, she says, “we don’t have the anesthesia – the analgesia, the pain control – to even provide a humane death.”

Her eyes begin to well. She has told this story to anyone who will listen. But “that particular thing really gets to me,” she says. She apologizes. “Can I please stop for a second?” she says, and strides away a few paces to calm the tangle of emotions.

Dr. Haj-Hassan has spent years travelling around the world with Médecins Sans Frontières, in addition to her work elsewhere – most recently as a fellow in the department of critical care medicine at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

Over the past week, she has circled the heart of American political power gathered in Chicago, clad in scrubs, speaking with politicians, journalists and members of the Palestinian-American community at the Democratic National Convention.

Dr. Haj-Hassan has pondered the response of Médecins Sans Frontières to Rwanda, where in 1994 it broke with past precedent and called for an armed intervention, saying “you can’t stop genocide with doctors.”

In Gaza, “a lot of humanitarian workers right now are grappling with exactly that,” she says.

Her presence in Chicago formed part of the intensive effort to bend the arc of American foreign policy away from its long-standing support of Israel. A few dozen convention delegates refused to support the nomination of Kamala Harris as the party’s presidential candidate. Hundreds signed a petition urging an immediate ceasefire in Israel. Still more protesters gathered on the streets of Chicago, demanding an arms embargo – or even just a time slot to describe the situation to gathered delegates, and the millions more watching on television.

In the end, they did not succeed.

Democratic party leaders allowed onto their main stage the parents of an American hostage still in Gaza, who described their son’s capture – trapped in a small shelter as militants tossed in grenade after grenade – and their anguish and misery in ensuing months.

No speaker made the same plea for the tens of thousands of dead Gazans.

Had they been allowed, that speaker might have been Dr. Haj-Hassan.

“Our first ask was for Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan to speak from the stage,” says Abbas Alawieh, a delegate to the Democratic convention this week who is among the founders of the Uncommitted National Movement. That movement persuadedhundreds of thousands of voters in the party’s primary to vote “uncommitted,” as a repudiation of President Joe Biden and his stalwart support of Israel.

The war in Gaza has created one of the most fractious divides inside a Democratic party that has boasted a new-found unity behind Ms. Harris as its presidential candidate. The medical profession has become a pillar of the movement advocating for Palestinians.

Dr. Haj-Hassan is someone “who was trying to piece back together children in Gaza who have been blown up into multiple pieces with the weapons that our government is sending,” Mr. Alawieh says. “Someone like her now has the double burden of also telling us from her first-hand account what happened.”

Other doctors, too, brought to Chicago accounts of what they had seen. Chicago emergency physician Tammy Abughnaim returned this week from Gaza, her second trip this year.

“This is the emergency of our time,” she said. She called it the responsibility of the political class “to listen to the witnesses of these crimes.”

While Palestinian journalists continue to operate in Gaza – more than 100 have been killed since October – Israel has largely barred international media from the area. Doctors have become critical observers, both for those seeking to understand what is happening, and for those pushing for change.

It is important for medical professionals, particularly Americans, “to be in conversations with lawmakers, to be in conversations with the administration – so that they can maybe invoke their humanity and have them realize that yes, we are seeing people who are dying and suffering,” says Ilhan Omar, a Democrat in Congress. “And it is all being done with our own tax dollars.”

On Thursday, Ms. Harris sought to find a middle ground between the warring groups in the Middle East, promising as she accepted the party’s nomination that “I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself,” while also decrying the suffering and devastation in Gaza. The war must end, she said, so “Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”

Dr. Haj-Hassan, an American educated at Stanford and Oxford, admits being reluctant to speak out. She risks not being able to return to Gaza – many doctors have been refused repeat visits – and she does not relish entering the political fray.

But she spoke this week with a friend in Gaza who is the first female surgeon there, and who urged her to call on U.S. leadership to force an end to the war.

She said, “just tell them they can stop it. In a second, they can stop it. They say one thing and it’s done,” Dr. Haj-Hassan says.

“And I know that. That’s why I’m here. It’s just really painful having to be face to face with all the hypocrisy.”

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The Dems are either skillful at harvesting votes from expat Gazans and carefull not to disaffect Jewish votes, or they are well along on the slippery slope of falling into Iran’s sympathy honey pot that is the Palestinian ‘peaceful, we just want to live in our land and not try to kill all Jews’ cause…
 
The Dems are either skillful at harvesting votes from expat Gazans and carefull not to disaffect Jewish votes, or they are well along on the slippery slope of falling into Iran’s sympathy honey pot that is the Palestinian ‘peaceful, we just want to live in our land and not try to kill all Jews’ cause…
This, from The Economist, is 10+ days old but still germane:

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Can Kamala Harris win Michigan without Arab-American voters?​

The Democratic nominee will have tricky territory to navigate at next week’s party convention​

Kamala harris’s first encounter with pro-Palestinian protesters since becoming the Democratic nominee unfolded at a campaign rally in a Michigan suburb on August 7th. As Ms Harris spoke to thousands of buoyant supporters, the dissenters disrupted the party vibe: “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide! We won’t vote for genocide!” Ms Harris acknowledged their right to speak, but as they carried on, she lost patience: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”

The setting for the confrontation was hardly surprising. Michigan gave birth to the movement that encouraged Democrats to cast “uncommitted” ballots during the primaries, to protest against Joe Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza. Some 13% of voters in Michigan’s Democratic primary did so. The protest vote was most pronounced on college campuses and in the city of Dearborn, where a majority of residents are of Arab heritage. In nearly half of Dearborn’s precincts the uncommitted vote beat Mr Biden. In Michigan, a swing state, Mr Biden’s poll numbers sank well below the support he enjoyed in 2020, when he won by 2.8 points.

In a close election, young pro-Palestinian voters and the small but changeable Arab-American electorate in Michigan may be decisive. But Ms Harris is doing better in the state, for now. A New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters has her up by four points. There is evidence that she is not being as widely blamed as Mr Biden was for the bloodshed in Gaza.

Democratic weakness among Michigan’s Arab-American voters—2-3% of the state’s electorate—predates Gaza. Their preferences track America’s forever wars and culture wars. George W. Bush won a majority of the state’s Arab vote in 2000. But after September 11th 2001 and the invasion of Iraq, Arab-Americans drifted towards Democrats. For the next five presidential elections Democratic strength among these voters seemed unshakable. In 2020 mostly-Arab precincts in Dearborn favoured Mr Biden by a 67-point margin.

But in the 2022 midterms, long before the war in Gaza, the vote moved back towards Republicans (see chart). The culture wars had come for Dearborn. Concerns that the school library stocked young-adult books with gay characters turned school-board meetings combative. “Republicans were gaining a foothold,” recalls Abed Hammoud, a Democrat and founder of the Arab American Political Action Committee.

A referendum that year to enshrine abortion rights in Michigan’s constitution won statewide by 13 points. But it lost outright in some Dearborn precincts and the city of Hamtramck (see map), which is home to a large Yemeni population. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, won re-election as governor but saw her vote share fall by 22 points in majority-Arab precincts in Dearborn compared with four years earlier.

Then came the war in Gaza. “You had a fire that was simmering, and somebody poured gasoline on it,” says Mr Hammoud. “At this point everything is seen through the lens of Gaza,” he added. As the devastation there mounted, opposition to Mr Biden intensified. Yet since she has become the nominee, Ms Harris appears much better positioned to withstand the protests.

In June some 65% of Democrats who said they were more sympathetic to the Palestinians in the Israel-Palestinian conflict said they had a favourable view of Ms Harris. In the first poll conducted after Mr Biden dropped out, favourable views of her among this group rose by 14 points. And she has also improved her support among Democrats more sympathetic to Israel, whose favourable assessment of Ms Harris rose from 73% to 89%.

Next week Democrats will gather in Chicago to hail Ms Harris as their nominee. Protesters are also expected. A group that puzzlingly still calls itself the Abandon Biden campaign will hold a convention in the city headlined by two pro-Palestinian third-party candidates, Jill Stein and Cornel West. The “uncommitted” movement hopes to organise the handful of delegates it won in the primaries to show support inside the Democratic convention for an arms embargo, something Ms Harris’s campaign has rejected. Ms Harris will be speaking, but will she be listening? ■

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For the past 20+ years Muslims, mainly Arabs but also Iranians, Africans and Asians have left the "sh!itholes" in which they were born and have migrated, often welcomed by political leaders as diverse as George W Bush and Justin Trudeau, and they now form powerful voting blocks in many areas in Europe, Australia and North America. Some, not all by any stretch of the imagination, not even a majority of those Muslims, on settling in "the liberal West" have decided that they want to turn it into a Muslim theocracy.

My personal experience with friends and colleagues says that most Muslims who migrated to North America want to be "liberal Westerners" but most Muslims of my acquaintance keep their heads down, as it were, and focus on their families and careers. Some, NOT a majority, experience discrimination and a lack of opportunity and that, along with a sincere belief in many of the tenets of Islam turn them towards radical, fundamentalist Islam and violent 'jihad' and so on.
 
The Dems are either skillful at harvesting votes from expat Gazans and carefull not to disaffect Jewish votes …
Not always entirely successfully on that second bit …
Very broadly Sorta-kinda Team Orange here these days.
 
Some say he could already be in line for a future Trump presidency job, too :)
Latest down this road ....
 
Latest down this road ....
Might as well open up an investigation on whether the moon landings really happened
Tinfoil Hat GIF by The Tick
 
He can be the inaugural chair of the "Let's Kill Samoan Kids" task force.


Only 31% of Samoan infants received the measles vaccine last year, falling from as high as 90% in 2013, according to WHO figures.

One of the largest players in global anti-vaccination advocacy is Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Children’s Health Defense, which a study recently found pays for a significant proportion of all such advertisements on Facebook.

Mr Kennedy is the nephew of former US President John F. Kennedy. His family members have distanced themselves from his views.

In the wake of the infant deaths, Mr Kennedy’s organisation ran social media posts questioning the safety of vaccines and did not update them when the true cause came to light.
 
If you can't watch a political circus convention without the "we're so awesome" atmosphere making you grit your teeth, you should probably avoid watching the convention. The whole point of conventions is hype (now vibes, I guess) unless a true open candidate selection-by-delegates process is in effect (which is pretty much never the case for the US presidency).

I am finding feverish amounts of cope being dropped everywhere as I catch up on my regular reading. How the hell did the script get flipped to where Democrat defenders are pointing to Trump whenever some kind of unfavourable accusation is directed against them and saying, "Yeah, but look how bad he is?" Everything bad about Trump is already priced in by voters; not everything bad about everyone else is. Wrestling with the pig isn't a winning strategy.

At RCP, Senate is 50R/45D/5TU. Congress is D+0.9, when the past couple of cycles indicate that D+1 to D+1.5 is a dead heat. Harris is D+1.5 in popular vote, when the past couple of cycles indicate the Democrat needs to be running at D+3 or better. Trump still (barely) holds 5 of the 7 battleground states. Harris needs another bump (a convention bounce) to show up in the next few days and stick around. At least the potential Senate/House bleed has probably been staunched, which was the real reason Biden had to go.

Under "conventional US political wisdom on things that don't matter much to presidential elections", add "nothing that happens before Labor Day" to "VPs".
 
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