Kamala Harris Election Night 2016: "Do not despair"

FLIPPABLE: Pam Iovino for PA-SD37 (April 2, 2019)

I was raised in a suburb of Pittsburgh, the youngest of three. Our household was lower-middle socio-economically, however, my parents never let me lose sight of the idea that if I tried my best and I got a good education, I could be anything I wanted to be. This idea lead me to graduation from Gettysburg College, then pursuing a commission in the U.S. Navy -- graduating with distinction from Officer Candidate School, and eventually to earning a Masters degree from the Naval War College.

My 23 year career in the United States Navy, culminating in promotion to Captain, grounded me in a career of public service. After tours as a Missile Maintenance Officer, Manpower analyst, Network Warfare program manager, Commanding Officer assignments, and Congressional Liaison I retired from the Navy. My retirement was to assume the Senate-confirmed Presidential appointment as Assistant Secretary at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

As Assistant Secretary, I was the Department’s lead advocate on Capitol Hill for our nation’s 25 million veterans and their families, protecting and improving their benefits. Most recently I served as the Director of Veterans Services for Allegheny County.

A career in public service, at the federal and local level, make me uniquely qualified to serve in Harrisburg. My life and my career have been dedicated to these pursuits and I am ready to work for people across our district. I’m tested — I was a Captain in the Navy, and I was confirmed by our friends across the aisle to be Assistant Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. I am ready to hit the ground running on day one as your State Senator. I will bring dignity, independence, and our shared values to Harrisburg because I believe deeply that this is what our families deserve.





https://pamforpa.com

PA-SD37: Dems recommend Pam Iovino, GOP nominates D. Raja

Democrats and Republicans in Pennsylvania's 37th state Senate district convened their committees in the South Hills on Sunday to choose their nominees for the April special election, setting up a match-up between a Navy veteran and a well-connected GOP stalwart.

In the morning, Democratic committee members recommended former Navy officer Pam Iovino to be their party’s torch-bearer. Hours later, Republican conferees chose Allegheny County Republican Committee chairman D. Raja to be theirs.

The special election on April 2 will decide who represents the district covering Allegheny County's western and southern suburbs and Peters in Washington County. The winner will serve in the seat that Guy Reschenthaler vacated until it's up for election in 2020.

On the Democratic side, it only took one ballot for Ms. Iovino to win the committee members' endorsement over emergency physician Bob Solomon. Of 246 committee members present at the meeting, Ms. Iovino was selected by 137. The threshold to win was 124.

In her pitch to the committee members before the vote was taken, Ms. Iovino said she would fight for "quality, affordable, accessible" health care, protect seniors and support public schools.

"We need to send up to Harrisburg for Governor Wolf to have one more ally, someone he can trust, to fight for the things we care about," Ms. Iovino said.

Democrats expected the vote to go to multiple ballots, but Olivia Benson — community engagement director at the Women and Girls Foundation — dropped out of the race during her speech to the committee. She said she is mounting a run for auditor general in 2020.


https://www.post-gazette.com/news/politics-state/2019/01/27/Democrats-Pennsylvania-37th-state-senate-district-recommend-Pam-Iovino-nomination/stories/201901270186

Tweet of the Day

Kamala Harris Announcement Live Thread

Kamala Harris announces her candidacy in Oakland

The final journey: A terminally ill cancer patient's nearly 2-year trek down the Mississippi River

Kelly Phillips was going to die. That much was certain.

The question was when.

As the terminally ill cancer patient lay in bed, contemplating the few short months his doctors said he had left, he knew that this business of dying would not take place in hospice care in New Jersey.

He would spend his final days on the brackish waves of the Mississippi River -- free.

Phillips said he called his brother who lives in Wisconsin and asked him if he could find him a houseboat on the Mississippi. He bought the boat from his hospice bed, packed up his belongings, his dog Sapphire and flew out to Wisconsin to spend his last days aboard his boat, the “Shameless.”

The journey entailed traveling down a river that extends over 2,000 miles and across 10 states with zero sailing experience and only $214 in his pocket with his dog at his side.

“I didn’t do anything to prepare,” Phillips said. “I learned as I went.”

That was 20 months ago now and Phillips has made it to his final destination, Venice, Louisiana.



https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/final-journey-terminally-ill-cancer-patients-year-trek/story?id=60555249

'Do not expect to see special counsel Robert Mueller make any attempt to flip Stone.'

Unfortunately for Stone, and what makes fighting this case futile, is that the government will not need to rely on the credibility of any individuals to make its case. The email and text evidence laid out in excruciating detail in the indictment is not open to interpretation. Just one example: On the very day that Stone testified that he had never sent or received emails or text messages from Credico, the two men had exchanged more than 30 text messages. Good luck spinning that.

And if that were not enough—and believe me, it is—the case will be tried in D.C. There is a facile critique that liberals are soft on crime. That can be true where the defendants are perceived to be from a disadvantaged minority. But have pity on an arrogant, white-collar defendant who is in cahoots with a despised Republican president; you will witness righteous fury. The venire in D.C. reviles Trump, and they will find Stone loathsome. The only contentiousness will be during jury selection, as the potential jurors all fight to be chosen so they can “do justice.”

Finally, do not expect to see Special Counsel Robert Mueller make any attempt to flip Stone and have him cooperate. A defendant like Stone is far more trouble than he is worth to a prosecutor. Stone is too untrustworthy for a prosecutor to ever rely upon. He has told so many documented lies, and bragged so often about his dirty tricks, that he simply has too much baggage to deal with even if here to want to cooperate—which seems unlikely in any event. Mueller, I suspect, would not even be willing to engage in a preliminary debrief with Stone to just test the possibility of cooperation out of concern that Stone would immediately go on television with his pals at Fox News to decry Mueller’s Gestapo tactics.

In short, Mueller does not need Stone to get to someone else and, even if he did, he could not rely on whatever Stone told him. Stone has nothing to sell that Mueller would be interested in buying.




https://www.thedailybeast.com/no-escape-for-roger-stone-muellers-case-is-a-slam-dunk-and-hes-too-slimy-to-get-flipped

US economy lost at least $6 billion during shutdown, S&P says

The U.S. economy lost at least $6 billion during the record-long partial government shutdown, S&P Global Ratings said Friday.

The economic hit stems from a loss of productivity and and economic activity lost to outside business during the shutdown, which ended on its 35th day on Friday, Reuters reported.

Nearly 800,000 federal employees were furloughed or working without pay during the shutdown.


https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/427085-us-economy-lost-at-least-6-billion-during-shutdown-sp-says

Lawmaker proposes dress code for parents when dropping off children at schools

Tennessee state Rep. Antonio Parkinson (D) is gaining national headlines after he proposed a measure to enforce a dress code on all parents in the state when visiting public schools.

The Tennessee Democrat told TODAY in an interview published on Friday that he realized it was time for parents to adhere to a set of rules after hearing a number of “horror stories” from educators and constituents about how parents dress and behaved when visiting the state’s public schools.

"People wearing next to nothing. People wearing shirts or tattoos with expletives. People coming onto a school campus and cursing the principal or the teacher out. These things happen regularly," Parkinson said.

“A principal I talked to told me a lady came into the office with her sleepwear on with some of her body parts hanging out. You got children coming down the hall in a line and they can possibly see this,” he added.

Parkinson told the news publication that in addition to the dress code aspect of the bill, the measure he is pushing would also ask public school districts across Tennessee to create their own "codes of conduct" for adults when visiting public schools.

"Whether you’re there to work, whether you’re a teacher, a parent, a vendor, a visitor, a speaker — anyone who steps on a school campus should be held to a basic minimum expectation of conduct and behavior,” he told the outlet. “That includes how one dresses.”


https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/427123-lawmaker-proposes-dress-code-for-parents-when-dropping-off-children-at

Politico's at it again. Kamala is 'ruthless'.

Harris, now a U.S. senator from California who announced her candidacy for president on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, often speaks about her childhood growing up on the boundary between Oakland and Berkeley, the daughter of an Indian-born mother and a Jamaican-born father who pushed her in civil rights marches in a stroller. Her advisers believe that, like Barack Obama once did, Harris could appeal not only to white progressives in 2020 Democratic primary states like Iowa and California but also to black voters in the primary’s critical Southern states.

Harris has drawn on her record as a prosecutor, both in San Francisco and as California attorney general, to lend an intimacy to her progressive views on criminal justice reform. Yet she has struggled to reconcile her work as a prosecutor with the Democratic Party’s evolution on criminal justice in the age of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. Her first race for district attorney—and her entry into San Francisco’s fractious Democratic Party politics—reared her as a politician and offered a preview of her still-unfolding efforts to resolve those tensions with some of the party’s most leftward-tilting voters. San Francisco has sprung the careers of a catalog of Democratic politicians, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and California Gov. Gavin Newsom—all products, perhaps, of the intense, intraparty skirmishes in a politically homogeneous city of fewer than 1 million people.

“The San Francisco political arena is one of the most challenging, frankly, in America,” Art Agnos, a former San Francisco mayor, said. “We only have one member of Congress, two members of the Assembly, a state senator and a half representing the city.”



https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/24/kamala-harris-2020-history-224126