https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-harris-india/one-of-our-own-indians-cheer-bidens-pick-of-kamala-harris-as-white-house-running-mate-idUSKCN2581TF

CHENNAI (Reuters) - On annual trips to India as a child, Kamala Harris would go for strolls on the humid beaches of Chennai with her maternal grandfather and his friends, listening intently as they chatted about democracy and the need to treat everyone equally.

Harris, born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father who both immigrated to the United States to study, made history on Tuesday when U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden picked her as his vice president.

In a speech in 2018, Senator Harris recalled those early visits to her grandparents in the upscale neighbourhood of Besant Nagar, along the shores of the Bay of Bengal in southern India.

“I was not conscious of it at the time, but it was those walks on the beach with my grandfather in Besant Nagar that had a profound impact on who I am today,” Harris, now 55, said in New York.

Her grandfather, who was among millions of people who joined India’s independence movement, later became a high-ranking government official.

https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a27422434/kamala-harris-stepmom-mothers-day/

California Senator Kamala Harris announced in January that she would be running for president. But aside from being a United States Senator and a 2020 presidential candidate, she's also a stepmom to her husband Doug's children, Cole and Ella. In honor of Mother's Day, Sen. Harris writes about what it's like to be a stepmom—or, as her kids call her "Momala."

When I met Doug, the man who would become my husband, I also met a man who was a divorced father of two children, Cole and Ella, named after John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald. As a child of divorce, I knew how hard it could be when your parents start to date other people. And I was determined not to insert myself in their lives until Doug and I had established we were in this for the long haul. Children need consistency; I didn’t want to insert myself into their lives as a temporary fixture because I didn’t want to disappoint them. There’s nothing worse than disappointing a child.

So, we took it slow, and Doug and I put a lot of thought into when and how I would first meet the kids. And that meant waiting. As we waited, anticipation grew. When the day finally came, I had butterflies in my stomach. The plan was to go to a seafood hut off the Pacific Coast Highway called the Reel Inn, a favorite of the kids.

On my way to meet Doug, I picked up a tin of cookies and tied a ribbon in a bow around them. I took a few deep breaths. I was excited, and I was nervous. I rehearsed what I would say. Would the kids think the cookies were really nice or really weird? Was the ribbon too much? (The ribbon was probably a little extra, but over the years Cole and Ella have spared me by not telling me that.)



Cole and Ella could not have been more welcoming. They are brilliant, talented, funny kids who have grown to be remarkable adults. I was already hooked on Doug, but I believe it was Cole and Ella who reeled me in.

Team Biden wishes it had known something was slightly wrong with every woman before promising a female VP

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/11/team-biden-wishes-it-had-known-something-was-slightly-wrong-with-every-woman-before-promising-female-vp/



What a mess! With the deadline to select a vice president approaching, the members of Team Biden wish someone had told them before this all started that every high-profile woman they would consider for the vice presidency would turn out on further inspection to be just slightly wrong — too ambitious, or too self-effacing, or too prepared, or polarizing in some other, completely unexpected way. She might want to be president herself when this was over, which historically would be an anomaly for vice presidents, and probably ought to be disqualifying. Did these vying, sparring, lobbying women who were putting their names out there through such never-before-attempted means as meetings, statements and fundraising appearances not realize that they were in contention for the vice presidency, a sacred office not designed for grasping or distracting personalities?

What Team Biden needs is a vice president who can be a good team player, a supportive No. 2, in the mold of previous vice presidents! Perhaps someone like the historically self-effacing Theodore Roosevelt. It was said of him that he wanted to be “the corpse at every funeral and the bride at every wedding” because he was so notably demure. When I think of “good team player who shares the limelight well,” no name springs to mind faster than Teddy Roosevelt — except, possibly, Vice President Thomas Jefferson, a simple, unproblematic farmer.

That is all that this team is trying to find: a Lady Vice President who can live up to the role created by John Adams centuries ago, and step into the shoes of that smooth, popular man who famously got along with everybody. We just need a woman who can say of herself, as Adams did, “I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular" — whoops, sorry, wrong quote! It is indeed something Adams said, but does not express the sentiment of what we’re looking for very well. The point is, we just need someone with that undefinable thingness that John Adams had but these ladies all lack.

Where is the Richard Nixon this nation deserves, someone popular and easygoing with no political baggage or ambitions of her own?

If only these women could take a page from the book of Aaron Burr! That is all we really need: a vice presidentess as refreshingly unambitious as Burr surely must have been before he literally murdered a guy and then, it looks like, tried to make himself emperor of Mexico? Where will we find a vice president like John C. Calhoun, about whom there is probably nothing bad to say, or Andrew Johnson, a man so superb that when he was president he helped start our fun, wholesome tradition of impeachment-but-not-removal!

https://dcist.com/story/20/08/10/capital-one-arena-will-be-a-dc-polling-place-for-november-election/



In normal times, it’s a place you can watch basketball, hockey, monster trucks, Disney on Ice, Celine Dion, or Tool. But now the Capital One Arena will have a new purpose: polling place.

D.C. election officials have confirmed to DCist/WAMU that they’ll be using the facility for early and day-of voting for November’s election, joining Atlanta and Detroit as cities that are planning to repurpose basketball arenas as massive polling places where larger crowds can be accommodated while respecting social distancing rules.

The move follows an offer late last month from Monumental Sports and Entertainment—which owns the Washington Wizards, Washington Mystics, and Washington Capitals—for the city to use the arena as a polling place. The organization made the offer as part of a broader plan by the teams and its athletes to promote voting ahead of the November elections.

The decision to use Capital One Arena as a voting location comes as election officials are finalizing the locations of the 20 early voting sites they plan to open for a two-week period ahead of the Nov. 3 election and the 80 polling places they’ll be opening on Election Day itself.

https://secondnexus.com/donald-trump-fox-news-ad

With the November election only four months away, the strategic use of campaign funds has never been more important.

Though President Donald Trump's campaign boasts a massive war chest, some Republican voters have grown increasingly frustrated with both the campaign's and the Republican National Committee's extensive text messages and emails asking for donations.


This comes as Democratic nominee Joe Biden's campaign outraised Trump's for two months in a row, possibly signaling a growing enthusiasm for Biden's candidacy.

The Trump campaign recently disclosed that it bought 38 thousand dollars' worth of television ads on Fox News in the D.C. area.

https://twitter.com/MediumBuying/status/1290343476434001920

D.C. has only three electoral college votes and is considered solid blue territory. It neighbors Maryland, which has voted blue in every election since 1992, and Virginia—a technical swing state where Biden leads by an average of 10 points.

The ad sales on Fox News seemed like a waste of money, until people began speculating that the campaign was willing to pay to keep Trump—an avid watcher of Fox—feeling secure.

https://twitter.com/AhmedBaba_/status/1290357626375737345

https://www.georgetakei.com/most-oddly-racist-thing-2646810721.html?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1


Racism is terrible, there's no room for debate on that. But sometimes terrible things can also be terribly weird.

Today we're going to talk about instances of racism that left the victim confused more than hurt. Because, apparently, some people need to be told that Asian women are allowed to be named Lisa.

One Reddit user asked:

Minorities of reddit, what experience was so unbelievably racist, to the point where you weren't even mad, but just... Confused?

And fam, I cannot handle it. Some of these people legitimately seem like they mean well - which kind of makes things worse, honestly.

https://deadstate.org/alex-jones-urges-fans-to-kill-protesters-in-a-defensive-way/



During a rant on his show last Wednesday, Alex Jones said that unrest in American cities was proof of his predictions of the “new world order” taking hold in the Unites States, and the only way for citizens to defend themselves is to “kill as many of them” as possible.

Jones says that his outlet InfoWars confirmed that “maoists” in major cities have “explosives and weapons and trucks loaded with ammonium nitrate and just chlorine gas—everything.”

“I want to avoid confrontation. I don’t need to put that on my belt that—I mean, I don’t even want to kill these globalists,” Jones said. “But if they want to kill us, the best thing to do in a defensive way is kill as many of them as quickly as possible. Again, the media will misquote that. I don’t want to offensively kill anybody. But I’m not going to take this, okay?”

“If they take down your country, if they destroy your bank account, they murder a bunch of patriot leaders, what are you going to do?” Jones continued. “Because you always talked about when the New World Order came in and when the U.N. did this​, you were going to go out and shoot folks in blue helmets. They don’t wear blue helmets. They show up in black uniforms and burn down your local courthouse and overthrow your government, run your life, and once they get control of your police, those officers are programmed robots now, they’ll follow orders to come after you.”

“If you’re running a war, you kill high-value targets, and that means the leadership of the New World Order,” he said.