August 8, 2024

Thursday, August 8, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

The Vice President told Walz her decision, using her signature phone call videos.

Touch to Watch! Smile!

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36 million was the amount donated to HarrisWalz2024 on the day we first met Tim Walz.

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The Joy Campaign, the Hope Campaign, was in Wisconsin and Michigan yesterday.

EAU CLAIRE, WIS. – Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz held their first joint rally in the Midwest on Wednesday, telling more than 12,000 people who gathered in the battleground state of Wisconsin that America cannot withstand another Donald Trump presidency.

Walz was in friendly territory in his neighboring state, receiving a thunderous ovation and praise from top Wisconsin Democrats who spoke before him. Harris told the crowd that Wisconsin will play a pivotal role in this year’s presidential election.

“The path to the White House runs right through this state, and with your help, we will win in November,” Harris said. “We are going to win.”

Their outdoor rally held in the farm country of Eau Claire was the second since Harris announced Walz as her running mate. A Harris-Walz rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday night drew 10,000 inside the venue and 4,000 outside. Harris and Walz are in the midst of a jam-packed schedule of stops in competitive battleground states. (Minneapolis, Star Tribune).

Harris, Walz bring historic campaign to Michigan, rallying at Detroit Metro Airport

Taking the stage before a rollicking crowd gathered at a hot Detroit Metro Airport hangar on Wednesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris made her first appearance as the Democratic presidential nominee in Michigan, introducing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, and saying "the path to the White House runs right through this state."

"I know we are all clear about what we are up against," Harris told the crowd, referring to the threat she said is posed by the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump and his conservative agenda. But she said in the speech that began just before 8 p.m. that Democrats were not grim about their chances or the effort ahead. "Understand that in this fight, we are happy warriors," she said. "Hard work is good work."

“This election is going to be a fight," she said as the speech got underway. "We like a good fight. When you know what you stand for, you know what to fight for and we know what we stand for."

Moments into her speech, Harris rebuked a small group of hecklers chanting slogans about genocide in Gaza.

"If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that, otherwise I'm speaking." Harris said as she flashed a withering stare at the protesters, who were drowned out by the rest of the crowd before being escorted out.

Harris said Trump's election, if it were to happen, would threaten fundamental freedoms, exacerbate climate change and damage health care access.

"In the next 90 days we need you to use your power ... we need you to energize and organize and mobilize and make your voices heard," she said, as she wrapped up a speech that lasted for about a half hour. "When we fight, we win!"

Speaking before Harris came out, Walz revved up a crowd he said he was told was the largest to date of any rally of the Democratic campaign this year.

"It’s been a pretty interesting 24 hours for me, I have to be honest," said Walz, referring to his joining Harris for their first rally together Tuesday in Philadelphia. Noting that thousands came out to the airport and stood in the heat to be part of the effort to elect Harris, he said. "This is a place full of working folks, students, folks who care ... you did it (attended the rally) for one simple and beautiful and eloquent reason, you love this country."

Walz also said while Republicans "try to steal the joy from this country," Harris "emanates" it. Several speakers echoed the joy theme, calling Trump dark and divisive.

Both Walz and Harris gave shout-outs to union leaders, including UAW Shawn Fain, who spoke at the rally as well.

The UAW, said Harris, "knows what they fight for and knows how to win."

The rally was boisterous and at times profane but the crowd loved it swaying to the music and waving campaign placards.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer scored the loudest welcome of the warm-up speakers. She spoke just before Harris and Walz took the stage, praising their background while denouncing Trump.

"The truth is we can’t afford another four years of Donald Trump," she said. "A second term of Donald Trump would be an unmitigated disaster…. You wouldn’t buy a used car from this guy, much less trust him with the auto industry."

According to the RealClearPolitics.com average of polls done in the state, Harris had a 2-percentage-point lead on Trump in Michigan as of Wednesday. Prior to Biden's leaving the race, the Republican former president had a lead of about that much over Biden. On the day Biden stepped aside, a Free Press poll showed Trump with a 7-point lead over Biden, the highest such showing for a Republican presidential candidate in Michigan in decades. (Detroit Free Press)

How many people were at the Harris rally in Michigan?
ROMULUS, MI — A lot can change in a presidential election in 27 days. Some things, though, stay the same. A crowd of 15,000 people roared for Vice President Kamala Harris as she and her new running mate rallied supporters for her presidential campaign in a Detroit Metropolitan Airport hangar Wednesday, Aug. 7.2 hours ago (MLive.com).

Israel, Gaza, Jewishness and antisemitism in our politics.

In a new interview, former President Donald Trump said that Kanye West, who has a long history of making antisemitic comments, is “a really nice guy” with a “good heart.”

Then-President Donald Trump met with Kanye West in the Oval Office of the White House, Oct. 11, 2018.

(JTA) — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that Ye, the rapper whose antisemitic tirades prompted international furor and led to the collapse of his career, is “a really nice guy” with a “good heart.”

Trump made the comments Monday during a wide-ranging interview with right-wing Jewish video game streamer Adin Ross, whose large audience allows him to land prominent interviewees.

The former president’s comments were reflective of his long, close relationship with the artist formerly known as Kanye West, who publicly endorsed Trump before declaring in 2022 he was going to go “Death Con 3 on Jewish people.” Ye’s remarks, which later included a series of admiring comments about Adolf Hitler, inspired a spate of antisemitic acts across the country including graffiti reading “Kanye Is Right About The Jews.”

Shortly after Ye lost his billion-dollar contract with Adidas over his comments, Trump hosted him for a dinner at which the Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes was also in attendance, drawing heavy criticism.

Trump made only brief comments about Ye during the Monday stream, which was also marked by the 24-year-old Ross giving him a Tesla Cybertruck and a Rolex watch — a possible violation of campaign finance laws. The Ye remarks came when Ross put a photo of the musician on his computer screen and asked Trump for his immediate reactions to him.

“He’s really complicated. Let’s say ‘complicated,’” Trump said about Ye. “He is a really nice guy but he can get himself into trouble and he can get some other people. But he’s got a good heart.”

Elsewhere in the interview, which took place on the streaming platform Kick, Trump repeatedly said Israel would not currently be threatened with an attack from Iran if he were president.

“I’ve heard that Israel’s going to be attacked tonight. If I were president, nobody would even be talking about that word because it wouldn’t happen, 100%,” he said. Later he remarked that “if the election weren’t rigged” — referring to the 2020 election, which Trump falsely claims was stolen — “we wouldn’t have that attack on Israel.” (The Forward).

Wesley Bell Defeats Cori Bush, a ‘Squad’ Member and Vocal Critic of Israel.

Her defeat is another loss for progressives in a race defined by Democratic divisions over the war in Gaza, with pro-Israel groups pouring millions into a campaign to oust her from office.

Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, one of the most outspoken progressives in the House, lost her primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, falling to a campaign by powerful pro-Israel political groups intent on ousting a fierce critic of the nation’s war in Gaza.

Her opponent, Wesley Bell, a county prosecutor, ran as a progressive and a pragmatist. But he was boosted by more than $8 million in spending from a super PAC affiliated with the country’s largest pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and other similar entities. That outside money transformed the race into one of the most expensive House primaries in history.

The contentious contest came just weeks after Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, another outspoken progressive and vocal Israel critic, suffered a stinging primary defeat. The same pro-Israel groups that poured $15 million into defeating Mr. Bowman were aiding Mr. Bell, and all eyes were on Ms. Bush to see if she would be the next member of the ultraliberal “squad” to see defeat.

[Israel’s] retaliation for the deadly massacre on Oct. 7 carried out by Hamas has divided mainstream Democrats from progressives like Ms. Bush, who has vocally condemned Israel’s government over its military campaign and the rising civilian death toll in Gaza.

Ms. Bush made herself vulnerable to a serious primary challenge through a string of controversial votes and positions. She was one of two Democrats who voted in January against a resolution to bar members of Hamas and anyone who participated in the attacks against Israel on Oct. 7 from the United States.

In an interview with The New York Times, she declined to call Hamas a terrorist organization.

“Would they qualify to me as a terrorist organization? Yes. But do I know that? Absolutely not,” Ms. Bush said. “I have no communication with them. All I know is that we were considered terrorists, we were considered Black identity extremists and all we were doing was trying to get peace. I’m not trying to compare us, but that taught me to be careful about labeling if I don’t know.”

Later, a spokeswoman walked back the comment, saying: “The congresswoman knows Hamas is a terrorist organization.”
(New York Times)

Did Josh Shapiro's Jewish identity play a role in Kamala Harris' choice? - The Jerusalem Post

Did Harris opt against Josh Shapiro because he is Jewish? Campaign calls accusation ‘ridiculous.’ Prominent Democrats said the idea that Jews were not welcome in their ranks was absurd, given how many Jews hold senior roles in the party.

Is it weird that Kamala Harris chose Tim Walz to be her running mate instead of Josh Shapiro?

On Tuesday, as soon as the vice president announced that the Minnesota governor would be her running mate, critics of the choice began suggesting that she sidelined Pennsylvania’s governor because he is Jewish.

“Did Harris reject Shapiro just because progressives don’t like that he was Jewish?” tweeted Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer and gadfly who has said he is a Democrat but has frequently defended Donald Trump.

Maury Litwack, an Orthodox Union executive who focuses on education policy, tweeted, “Democrats: You can be excited about the Walz pick but also be sad that an outright antisemitic campaign was waged against Shapiro. Some soul searching is needed.”

Harris’s campaign pushed back immediately against claims that she caved to the progressive anti-Shapiro campaign that gathered steam over the past week. In a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, an aide to Harris rejected the accusation that Shapiro’s faith or stances on Israel was a consideration.

“Assertions that Vice President Harris did not select Gov. Shapiro based on his religion or views on Israel are absolutely ridiculous and offensive,” the aide said.
“Vice President Harris has an unwavering commitment to Israel’s security, as she reaffirmed last night following the meeting in the Situation Room,” where she and President Joe Biden joined a briefing about Iranian plans to attack Israel, the aide said. “She will always combat antisemitism whenever and wherever she sees it.”

Republicans have seized on the choice of Walz to paint Democrats as antisemitic. But while Jewish Democrats have expressed concern about antisemitism among Shapiro’s critics, they’re lining up behind Walz — and pushing back on the notion that antisemitism played any role in the decision.

Multiple commentators noted that Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish.

“Multiple things can be true: Some extreme voices targeted Shapiro. And Harris — who is married to a Jew and proudly highlights it — picked Walz because she felt he was best for the ticket,” tweeted Amy Spitalnick, the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who had lacerated the anti-Shapiro campaign and whose group frequently allies with progressives.

And the Democratic Party’s official Jewish affiliate noted that Walz, like most Democratic officials, is a consistent supporter of Israel.

In addition to the Harris campaign’s statement, Shapiro himself has suggested that his views on Israel and his Jewish identity weren’t factors in the decision. In his statement following the selection, Shapiro suggested he was not quite ready to leave his job, in which he is wildly popular, after just 18 months. Politico also reported that he was ambivalent about ending his term early.

When conservative commentator Erick Erickson tweeted, “No Jews allowed at the top of the Democratic Party,” he received a response from Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, who is the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in history.

“News to me,” Schumer wrote. (The Jerusalem Post).

Tim Walz wrote a master's thesis on Holocaust education, just as his own school's approach drew criticism - Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz applauds Holocaust survivor Dora Zaidenweber, then 99, at the annual event of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas in June, 2023.

In Judi Agustin’s freshman year at Mankato West High School, her teacher instructed her to wear a yellow star.

It was part of a Holocaust curriculum at the school, located in a remote area of Minnesota with barely any Jews. For a week, freshmen were asked to wear the yellow stars, which were reminiscent of the ones the Nazis made the Jews wear. Seniors played the part of the Gestapo, charged with persecuting the “Jews.”

Unlike everyone else in her class in the 2001-2002 school year, Agustin was Jewish. The experience “was incredibly hurtful and offensive and scary,” she recalled on Tuesday. Her father complained to the district, and wrote a letter to the local paper decrying the lesson. In response, she recalled, the head of the department put a stop to them.

The teacher who intervened, according to her recollection: current vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.

When Tim Walz found out about it, he squashed it real quick, and as far as I understand they never did it again,” Agustin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “So he was an advocate for my experience, as one of four Jewish kids in the entire school district. And I always felt like he had our back.”

JTA could not independently verify that he was the teacher who stopped the Mankato West lesson.

But it’s clear that how to teach the Holocaust well has occupied Walz for decades. In 1993, while teaching in Nebraska, he was part of an inaugural conference of U.S. educators convened by the soon-to-open U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Eight years later, after moving to Minnesota, he wrote a thesis arguing for changes in Holocaust education. And as governor, he backed a push to mandate teaching about the Holocaust in Minnesota schools.

Through it all, Walz modeled and argued for careful instruction that treated the Holocaust as one of multiple genocides worth understanding.

“Schools are teaching about the Jewish Holocaust, but the way it is traditionally being taught is not leading to increased knowledge of the causes of genocide in all parts of the world,” Walz wrote in his thesis, submitted in 2001.

The thesis was the culmination of Walz’s master’s degree focused on Holocaust and genocide education at Mankato State University, which he earned while teaching at Mankato West. His 27-page thesis, which JTA obtained, is titled “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom.”

In it, Walz argues that the lessons of the “Jewish Holocaust” should be taught “in the greater context of human rights abuses,” rather than as a unique historical anomaly or as part of a larger unit on World War II. “To exclude other acts of genocide severely limited students’ ability to synthesize the lessons of the Holocaust and the ability to apply them elsewhere,” he wrote.

He then took a position that he noted was “controversial” among Holocaust scholars: that the Holocaust should not be taught as unique, but used to help students identify “clear patterns” with other historical genocides like the Armenian and Rwandan genocides.

Walz was describing, in effect, his own approach to teaching the Holocaust that he implemented in Alliance, Nebraska, years earlier. In the state’s remote northwest region, Walz asked his global geography class to study the common factors that linked the Holocaust to other historical genocides, including economic strife, totalitarian ideology and colonialism. The year was 1993. At year’s end, Walz and his class correctly predicted that Rwanda was most at risk of sliding into genocide.

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Walz Told the New York Times in 2008, reflecting on those Alliance lessons. “That relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path.”

Last year, as Minnesota’s governor, Walz returned to Holocaust education, and supported and signed a law requiring the state’s middle and high schools to teach about the Holocaust. The law, initiated and championed by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, also encourages schools to teach about other genocides. A working group for the curriculum hit snags earlier this summer when a pro-Palestinian activist was removed from the committee amid debates on whether Israel’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide.

The mandate is still anticipated to go into effect in the 2025-2026 school year. “This is going to work out, this is going to be good, because the governor and his staff are highly attuned to the concerns and sensitivities of the Jewish community,” Ethan Roberts, the JCRC’s deputy executive director, told JTA.

Speaking at a JCRC event in June, Walz said he had been “privileged and proud” to have participated in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum training early in his career. But he said more needed to be done, and he emphasized that the curriculum chosen to accomplish the requirement would determine its success.

“We need to do better on Holocaust education. We need to do better on ethnic studies,” he told the crowd. “And I tell you this as a teacher and as governor, too, we don’t need test scores or anything to tell us that we’re failing.”

It was the kind of message that former Mankato West students said they came to expect from him.

“He is what you hope a great teacher is,” said Solo, “which is someone who’s not only teaching, but also learning at all times.” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency).

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Trump caught in another lie, this about Walz’s handling of the violence in Minnesota after George Floyd was murdered.

Despite new criticism, Trump told Walz in 2020 he was 'very happy' with his handling of George Floyd protests.

In the hours after Vice President Kamala Harris announced Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, allies of former President Donald Trump rushed to denigrate the Minnesota Democrat, seizing on criticism of his handling of the riots in the wake of George Floyd's murder in May 2020.

"He allowed rioters to burn down the streets of Minneapolis," Ohio Sen. JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, said Tuesday.

But at the time, Trump expressed support for Walz's handling of the protests, according to a recording of a phone call obtained by ABC News -- telling a group of governors that Walz "dominated," and praising his leadership as an example for other states to follow.

"I know Gov. Walz is on the phone, and we spoke, and I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days," Trump told a group of governors on June 1, 2020, according to a recording of the call, in which he also called Walz an "excellent guy."

"I was very happy with the last couple of days, Tim," Trump continued. "You called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins."

Trump also suggested on the call that it was his encouragement that sparked Walz to call in the National Guard: "I said, you got to use the National Guard in big numbers," Trump said. A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign said Wednesday that was untrue.

Trump's contemporaneous approval of Walz's decision-making in the wake of George Floyd's murder undermines one of Republicans' most vocal lines of attack against the vice presidential nominee. Critics have accused Walz of stalling the mobilization of the National Guard to quell rioters who set fire to 1,500 buildings, caused some $500 million in property damage, and were linked to at least three deaths.

Walz, himself a 24-year veteran of the National Guard, ultimately summoned more than 7,000 guardsmen to the Twin Cities. But that decision came 18 hours after Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey initially asked the governor to activate military personnel.

"This hesitation cost Minnesotans their lives, communities, and livelihoods," according to an investigative report compiled by Republicans in the state Senate.

At the time, Walz condemned the Republicans' report -- which was published just weeks before his 2022 reelection -- as a political hit job that was "unhelpful." More recently, Walz brushed aside scrutiny of his handling of the protests.

"It is what it is," he recently told reporters. "And I simply believe that we try to do the best we can."

A pair of after-action reports commissioned by the city and state cited private miscommunications and public disputes between Walz and Frey as impediments to effectively handling the protests. At one point, Walz characterized the city's response as an "abject failure."

"Several interviewees blamed the Mayor and Governor for their public disagreements about the response to the protests and expressed that this was unproductive," according to the report commissioned by the city, which was released in March 2022.

Another complicating factor, those after-action reports indicated, was the failure of city officials to articulate their needs. The requests made on May 27 "initially lacked clarity and that more information and time was needed for [the state's emergency management office] to develop the necessary details of the mission to activate the Minnesota Guard," one report said.

For his part, Walz initially argued that mobilizing thousands of National Guardsmen requires time.

"The average person maybe assumes that there's soldiers waiting in helicopters to drop in like they do in movies," Walz said that Tuesday, May 26. "Actually, they're band teachers and small business owners. They're folks working in a garage in Fergus Falls who get a call that says you've got 12 hours to report to your armory."

Days later, however, Walz told a reporter that "if the issue was that the state should have moved faster, that is on me." (ABC News).

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Your daily reminder.

Trump is a convicted felon.

On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.

The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11. He will now be sentenced sometime around September 18th.

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Olympics Update.

Quincy Hall won Olympic gold in the men’s 400m final on Wednesday by just four-hundredths of a second in another dramatic photo finish at Paris 2024.

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