Wednesday, August 18, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.
Kamala is always busy.
Eye on our candidates.
A new ad. 👇 touch.
My mother saved for years to buy a home. I was a teenager when that day finally came—I remember how excited she was.
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 27, 2024
Right now, home ownership is out of reach for too many Americans.
When I am President, we will end the housing shortage by building 3 million homes and rentals. pic.twitter.com/PHVaSt5OCe
Kamala Harris, Tim Walz Set Their First Joint Interview With CNN
Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz will sit for an interview with CNN this week — marking Harris’ first major interview since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.
The interview will air as a primetime special on Thursday, Aug. 29, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CNN and across the news network’s platforms. Harris and Walz, in their first joint interview, will be interviewed by CNN anchor and chief political correspondent Dana Bash from the battleground state of Georgia.
The special, dubbed “The First Interview: Harris & Walz – A CNN Exclusive,” will stream live for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps on Aug. 29. The interview also will be available on demand beginning Friday, Aug. 30, to pay-TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps, and cable operator platforms.
The South may fall.
North Carolina
Good news in North Carolina. Let’s work to make Stein help Harris-Walz and Harris-Walz move Stein to 10.
BREAKING: Democrat Josh Stein is ahead of far-right MAGA extremist Mark Robinson by 8 points according to a new poll of the North Carolina Governor’s race.
— Protect Kamala Harris ✊ (@DisavowTrump20) August 26, 2024
RETWEET if you stand with Stein has he fights to flip North Carolina Blue! pic.twitter.com/K9aL6a2RV5
Georgia.
Democrats fight back on Trump Cult Dirty Tricks.
Democrats sue Georgia over election rules that could 'invite chaos.’
Aug 26 (Reuters) - Democrats sued Georgia state election officials on Monday, alleging new rules that could allow local officials to delay certification of November's presidential results were illegal.
The lawsuit was filed in the Superior Court of Fulton County by local Georgia Democratic politicians, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Party of Georgia. It says the rules approved by the Republican-controlled Georgia state election board this month were intended to give individual county election officials the ability to delay or cancel the certification of votes.
The lawsuit says the new rules "introduce substantial uncertainty in the post-election process and - if interpreted as their drafters have suggested - invite chaos by establishing new processes at odds with existing statutory duties."
The Georgia Secretary of State's office, which oversees the board, did not respond to requests for comment.
Last week, the five-member Georgia election board, which includes three conservative members championed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, voted 3-2 to empower county election board members to investigate any discrepancies between the number of cast ballots and the number of voters in each precinct before certification.
Such mismatches are not uncommon and are not typically evidence of fraud, according to voting rights advocates, who say that rule could permit individual board members to intentionally delay approval of the results.
The board has also in recent weeks approved a separate rule that county election boards conduct a "reasonable inquiry" into any irregularities before certifying the results. The rule did not define "reasonable" or set a particular deadline for completing the inquiry.
The Democrats' lawsuit says it is established law that it is the responsibility of the judicial system, not individual county election officials, to resolve allegations of voter fraud.
Trump has falsely claimed for years that the 2020 election was rigged by fraud.
His infamous January 2021 phone call in which he asked Georgia's top election official, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to "find" enough votes to sway the outcome helped lead to Trump's pending indictment on state charges. (Reuters).
One more thing.
The Harris-Walz presidential campaign will kick off a bus tour through south Georgia on Wednesday.
The tour will culminate with a rally in Savannah on Thursday.
Mobilize.us a Democratic website that organizes events and petitions, posted a waitlist online for those interested in attending the rally. It asks for your name, email address, phone number, and zip code. (Savannah Now).
Taking the pulse of Republican Voter suppression.
Updates from Marc Elias land!
Marc Elias won the 60 cases that Trump cultists offered in 2020. He now is a secure member of the Harris-Walz legal team.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) announced Monday the state has removed over one million people from its voter rolls since Republican legislators passed a sweeping voter suppression law three years ago. https://t.co/QqBndk6AJs
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) August 26, 2024
Big win.
A big win for voters.🥳
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) August 26, 2024
"Washington County, Pennsylvania’s board of elections must inform voters of errors on their mail-in ballots and allow them an opportunity to cast provisional ballots at the polls in the upcoming November election." https://t.co/VQ2H18GgmM
What happens if Election Certification doesn’t happen.
Watch this.👇
For Trump, disrespect to fallen soldiers seems to be a habit.
Trump visit to Arlington Cemetery sparks alleged altercation with cemetery aides.
An NPR source said a cemetery official was pushed and verbally accosted as they tried to block campaign aides from photographing.
Arlington National Cemetery officials on Tuesday acknowledged an unspecified “incident” during Donald Trump’s visit on Monday on the three-year anniversary of the Afghanistan withdrawal, as dueling allegations of misbehavior overshadowed an event to honor American war dead.
An NPR report on Tuesday cited an unidentified source with knowledge of the incident who said Trump campaign staff pushed and verbally attacked a cemetery official who tried to stop them from taking photos and video in an area of the cemetery called Section 60 where many U.S. service members who died in recent conflicts are buried. The cemetery said in a statement that federal law bars photography for political campaign purposes at the site.
But Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung said that “there was no physical altercation as described,” that the campaign was given permission to bring a photographer, and that they are “prepared to release footage” to defend against “defamatory claims.”
Responding to an inquiry about an alleged altercation during Trump’s visit, Arlington National Cemetery issued a statement that read: “We can confirm there was an incident, and a report was filed.” The organization did not share more details. It was not immediately clear to whom the report was filed, but the incident occurred on U.S. Army property. Army headquarters and the service’s criminal investigation division did not immediately respond to requests Tuesday night for clarification.
Visitors have long taken graveside photographs in Arlington National Cemetery, including in Section 60. But in a statement released on Tuesday, defense officials drew a distinction between Trump’s actions and those of typical visitors.
(Washington Post).
The people who know Trump best continue to speak out.
The number of Trump advisors and cabinet members who have denounced him total more than 40. These include former vice president Mike Pence, former attorney general William P. Barr and former White House chief of staff John Kelly. Former defense secretary Mark T. Esper, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson and former White House counsel Ty Cobb off went further and announced they would vote for the presumptive Democratic candidate, Joe Biden.
General McMaster’s blistering account of the Trump White House
(CNN) — Until now, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster has held his fire about his stint in the Trump White House. McMaster served with distinction in key American conflicts of the past decades: the Gulf War, the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan, but as McMaster recounts in his new book, “At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House,” in some ways, his most challenging tour as a soldier was his last one: serving as the national security adviser to a notoriously mercurial president.
In his blistering, insightful account of his time in the Trump White House, McMaster describes meetings in the Oval Office as “exercises in competitive sycophancy” during which Trump’s advisers would flatter the president by saying stuff like, “Your instincts are always right” or, “No one has ever been treated so badly by the press.” Meanwhile, Trump would say “outlandish” things like, “Why don’t we just bomb the drugs?” in Mexico or, “Why don’t we take out the whole North Korean Army during one of their parades?”
McMaster provides unique detail on Trump’s approach to foreign policy and — similarly to his successor in the national security adviser role, former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, who wrote scathingly about the former president in a book published in 2020 — his account is likely to do little to reassure US allies about the prospects of a second Trump term.
McMaster felt it was his “duty” to point out to Trump that Russian President Vladimir Putin “was not and would never be Trump’s friend.” McMaster warned Trump that Putin is “the best liar in the world” and would try to “play” Trump to get what he wanted and manipulate him with “ambiguous promises of a ‘better relationship.’”
The final straw that ended McMaster’s tenure in the White House seems to have been when he publicly said on February 17, 2018, at the Munich Security Forum — the annual gathering of top Western foreign policy officials — that the indictment of a group of Russian intelligence officers for their interference in the 2016 US presidential election was “incontrovertible” evidence of Russian meddling in that election.
Trump soon tweeted, “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians….” Once the commander-in-chief started publicly castigating him on Twitter, it was obvious that McMaster would not be long for the White House.
. . . in his new book, McMaster writes that in the aftermath of his 2020 electoral defeat, Trump’s “ego and love of self… drove him to abandon his oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution,’ a president’s highest obligation.” McMaster adds, “The attack on the US Capitol stained our image, and it will take a long-term effort to restore what Donald Trump, his enablers, and those they encouraged took from us that day.” (CNN).
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.
You know what else will happen on September 17-18?
The Federal Reserve will meet and cut interest rates, effectively announcing that inflation has ended and is no longer an American problem.
Credit for ending inflation without the usual attendant mass unemployment will go to Democrats. As for Trump and his cult, they will continue to gnash their teeth, rooting against America.
