You are an exciting candidate, and I am thrilled to help in any way I can to see you become President of the United States. I admired President Biden and his courage in selecting you to be his Vice-President.
Now I see you in the campaign trail, happy and spreading joy. Quite a contrast to Trump, who is always scowling, angry, and promising to wreak vengeance on his enemies.
I have one piece of advice: Please do not choose Josh Shapiro as your Vice President. I know he is popular in Pennsylvania, and you need Pennsylvania.
But Josh Shapiro is a supporter of vouchers. Vouchers are a hoax. Their boosters are right-wing foundations who oppose abortion, gun control, and climate action. Vouchers hurt public schools. Vouchers are the pet project of Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, the Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and Texas evangelical billionaires Wilks and Tim Dunn. Another huge voucher supporter is multibillionaire Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, who has spread money to other states to promote vouchers and is rumored to have encouraged Shapiro to push vouchers.
Vouchers are bad not only because of their supporters but because they fail to help poor kids. In fact, the evidence from evaluations in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, and D.C. demonstrate that vouchers damage the academic outcomes of poor kids.
Most students who use vouchers are already enrolled in private schools. Why should the state subsidize families who don’t need the money but would be happy to have it as a gift from the state?
I know you don’t have a lot of time for reading these days, but I urge you to read anything that voucher researcher Josh Cowen has written since 2022. In that year, he declared that vouchers had failed and were hurting the kids they were supposed to help. His new book, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, lucidly describes the origins of vouchers in the fight against desegregation in the 1950s and their utter failure to help “poor kids escape from failing schools.”
You have a great list of potential VPs. Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania should not be on that list.
But the immediate contradiction is that their candidate Trump has a long history of interacting with porn and—ahem—porn stars.
He writes:
Amid the 920 pages’ worth of conservative ideas in the Project 2025 plans for a second Donald Trump administration, one stands out for its sheer improbability: criminalizing pornography.
Just five pages into the foreword by the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation think tank, the proposal stakes out an uncompromising position that porn should be banned, porn producers and distributors should be sent to prison, and tech companies that circulate it should be shut down.
It’s true that politics makes strange bedfellows, but we’re talking about anti-porn crusaders teaming up with Trump, who has literally had his share of strange bedfellows. To recap:
He was on the March 1990 cover of Playboy magazine next to Playmate Brandi Brandt, who was wearing his tuxedo jacket and nothing else. He hung it on his wall of his office in Trump Tower and often autographed copies on the campaign trail in 2016.
He had short cameos in 1994 and 2000 Playboy videos in which he interviewed models (who, to be fair, were wearing clothes at the time) and took Polaroids, asking them if they had “what it takes” to be a Playmate.
He opened the nation’s first strip club inside a casino in in his failed Taj Mahal venture in Atlantic City in 2013. The 36,000-square-foot club took up the space formerly occupied by three restaurants.
He allegedly had an affair with Playmate Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stormy Daniels and was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records over hush money payments to Daniels made during his 2016 campaign. (Trump denies that he had sex with either woman.)
Trump has said,unconvincingly, that he does not know the people behind Project 2025 and does not support all of its proposals. But on this subject, he has previously endorsed a similar idea, signing a pledge from the group Enough is Enough in 2016 to crack down on porn and potentially appoint a presidential commission to look at the “harmful public health impact of Internet pornography on youth, families and the American culture.” (He did neither.)
Hahahaha!
Trump on the cover of Playboy, one of his proudest accomplishments!
The state of Florida—Ron DeSantis and his dumdum legislature—has decided that climate change doesn’t exist, but climate change doesn’t care. The Miami Herald reported that the last of a rare species in the Florida Keys has died—because of rising seas. The children of Florida won’t understand any of this because the State Department of Education will not buy textbooks that explain climate change. They think—I suppose—that if you don’t learn about it, it will go away.
Key Largo has a new, disturbing and first-of-its-kind graveyard. There are no headstones, no burial markers, no names, no bodies.
It’s the last place an incredibly rare species of tree called the Key Largo tree cactus was seen alive, back in 2023. The killer? All the clues point to climate change.
At least, that’s what a newly published paper suggests. Scientists have been watching this particular stand of cacti — known for their height (up to 20 feet) and brown hairlike puffball they grow around their flowers — since the 1990s.
At the time, researchers determined that a two-acre patch in John Pennekamp State Park was the only population in the U.S. of Pilosocereus millspaughii, an offshoot from the larger Caribbean population of the cactus. But as of last year, the very last of the bunch is gone. And researchers believe sea level rise was the main culprit — rising tides and groundwater turning the soil too salty for the plant to survive. It appears this local extinction (also known as extirpation) could be the first climate-driven demise of a species in the United States.
“As far as we know, from any published research we can find, this is the first case we can find,” same James Lange, lead botanist with Fairchild Tropical Botanical Gardens and co-author of the study, which was published Tuesday in the Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. “It was tragic to see as we monitored this over the years,” he said. “It was a big, old beautiful plant, one of the things that makes the Keys unique. And we’ve lost it.”
Trump selected J.D. Vance as his running mate. He is not well-known. He grew up in Appalachia, and he wrote a bestseller called Hillbilly Elegy. He subsequently graduated from Yale Law School and became a hedge fund Manager.
Not so long ago, he derided Donald Trump. But subsequently, he changed his view and became a Trump fan. He didn’t just criticize Trump, he loathed him.
Mercedes Schneider read Project 2025 and concluded that its unifying goal is to turn the American people into white evangelical Christians. This “conservative” vision of a different America doesn’t give much thought to those who are neither white nor evangelical not Christian.
She writes in summary:
Free the churches, imprison the librarians.
Roberts was in the news for stating that an “ongoing American Revolution” will “remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” According to The Hill, that comment caused “blowback” for Roberts and the Heritage Foundation.
None of Jesus’ ministry involved any political agenda, much less the government-driven denigration of “other” or the imposing of His will on any human being.
Yet here we are.
It behooves every literate American to read this extremist document before casting a vote in November.
Andy Borowitz is a humorist, probably the best in the country. He notes here that President Biden has exercised the new power of immunity for his official actions granted him by the U.S. Supreme Court. Very likely the rightwing majority created that “one person is above the law” exemption with the expectation that Trump would be the next president. Maybe they will reverse their decision when Kamala Harris is elected President.
Borowitz writes:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Using the sweeping presidential immunity recently granted him by the U.S. Supreme Court, President Biden on Tuesday replaced Judge Aileen Cannon with his dog, Commander.
The legal community’s initial reaction to the appointment was favorable, with most experts agreeing that Judge Commander is an improvement over Judge Cannon.
In his first official act, the German Shepherd reversed Cannon’s ruling on the Trump documents case by eating it.
President Biden had no comment on Commander’s decision, other than, “Good boy.” In a positive development for Judge Cannon, a GoFundMe has been established to send her to law school.
Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, a site founded by Never Trump Republicans, explains how he sees the new situation, the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the ascension of Kamala Harris as the likely nominee:
The Democratic party is healthy. The Republican party is not.
Our greatest living president. (Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
1. Seven Lessons
(1) The Democratic party is a healthy institution.
On the night of June 27, the various power centers within the Democratic party began a difficult conversation: Was Joe Biden still capable of running a vigorous campaign?
Over three weeks the party reached a diffuse—if not unanimous—consensus: He was not. This consensus was the product of all levels of the party: Elder statesmen such as Nancy Pelosi, elected Democrats analyzing their own future prospects, donors making decisions about spending, and the main body of public opinion among Democratic voters.
Once this consensus was reached, the various power centers began a dialogue with the party’s leader, President Biden. The party expressed its choice. Biden pushed back. The party took up the question again and, after due consideration, held firm.
Joe Biden then stepped aside for the good of the nation.
This is how healthy institutions are supposed to work…
2. The process which elevated Kamala Harris was sensible.
The Democratic party made another institutional decision in parallel with the Biden question: It vetted Kamala Harris.
This subroutine executed in the background, but it was active. Democratic voters began to consider her as the nominee and polling showed that they were comfortable with her. Party elders evaluated her fitness. Donors and elected Democrats took her measure. The fact that no anti-Harris groundswell—or even boomlet—emerged is proof that the party decided that Harris was an acceptable nominee.
After Biden blessed Harris on Sunday afternoon, the party coalesced around her in much the way it did Biden after the New Hampshire primary in 2020.
The Democratic party will enter the election more unified than it had been pre-debate.
3. Kamala Harris can run as an insurgent, but with the advantages of an incumbent.
The largest advantage of incumbency is that a candidate does not have to take base-pleasing positions during a primary campaign that can hurt him during a general election.
Because of the extraordinary nature of her ascendence, Harris possesses this advantage. She will carry nearly every advantage of incumbency and yet she can credibly position herself as this election’s change agent.
4. Trump is holding the age bomb.
The Trump campaign spent two years creating a political bomb concerning old age. They assumed that they could plant this bomb at the feet of Joe Biden.
Trump is now the one holding the age bomb. He is not only a full generation older than Harris—everything about him looks geriatric by comparison. From his gait to his bronzed-over pallor; from the way he rambles and gets lost in sentences to his inability to keep facts straight.
Every split screen now makes Trump look old and decrepit by comparison.
5. There was enormous pent-up demand among Democrats for a younger leader.
That’s more money than any Democrat has ever raised in a single day. It’s twice as much as Trump raised following his felony conviction. If this doesn’t snap your head back, it should.
Because it’s as good a proxy as you’ll find for excitement.
It will be several days until we have polling with a more detailed view of Harris’s support from Democratic voters, but it is already clear that she will perform much better than Biden has within her party.
Here’s my advice: You should be open to the idea that Harris could ride a wave of excitement and passion that absolutely no one was seeing until Biden stepped aside. I’m talking Obama ‘08-levels of energy.
It’s not a given. But it’s in the realm of the possible. Keep your eyes peeled for it.
6. The Republican party is a failed state.
At the debate, Donald Trump also demonstrated (again) that he is unfit for office. He rambled and lied incoherently. He is a convicted felon. A jury found him guilty of sexual assault. He has said he wants to be a “dictator” and that he wants to “terminate” parts of the Constitution. He selected as his running mate a man who advised disobeying orders from the Supreme Court and forcing a constitutional crisis.
Until last week there was nothing stopping the Republican party from forcing Trump off the ticket. The party elders and elected officials could have demanded that Trump step aside. Republican voters could have said that they had no confidence in his ability to govern. Donors could have closed their wallets.
But the plain fact is that not one single Republican called on Trump to step aside.
Not one.
Why? Because the various precincts of the Republican party understand that they hold no power—at all—over Trump. They could not ask him to withdraw from the race. Even broaching the subject would be grounds for excommunication from the party.
The Democratic party is a functioning institution, with checks and balances; constituencies and power structures. Like any institution, it is amorphous and its decision making is mostly organic.
The Republican party is an autocracy where the only thing that matters is the will of the leader. All power flows through him. All decisions are made by him. There are no competing power centers—only vassal states overseen by his noblemen.
7. Harris is an underdog.
One of the reasons the last three weeks have been so difficult is because Democrats were not choosing between a “good” outcome and a “bad” outcome.
Those sorts of choices are easy.
Instead, Democrats were tasked with deciding between least-bad options. Humans rebel against the idea of “least-bad.” When faced with choices, we want to believe that at least one of them is “good.”
When the first real Harris-vs.-Trump polling comes out next week we’ll see how big of a hole she’s in. But unlike Biden, Harris has the ability to spend the next three months on offense, all day, every day. If she can deliver the goods, she has a puncher’s chance.
2. In Praise of Biden
A slight push-back against those who believe Biden took too long to step aside:
It was three and a half weeks from the debate to Biden pulling out. That’s it.
Joe Biden is the president, but he’s also just a man. Coming to a decision like this one—an unprecedented decision—is hard. There’s a lot to weigh and there’s a tremendous responsibility to get it right.
My own view is that Biden made the call basically as quickly as possible. He couldn’t have done it the week of the NATO summit. Then Trump was shot in the ear. Then there was the Republican convention. To my mind, Biden’s timing on this was optimal, actually.
Nothing about Joe Biden’s presidency was inevitable. Not his candidacy. Not his victory over Trump. Not his withdrawal from reelection.
At nearly every turn, Biden did the right thing for America.
His legacy is assured. He will be remembered as one of the great modern presidents.
I said this last night and I’ll say it again. History had its eye on Joe Biden, and he met the moment. He did his part. Now it’s up to Kamala Harris and us to do ours.
Dean Obeidallah blogs at “The Dean’s Report.” Here he describes Kamala Harris’s secret weapon. She terrifies Donald Trump. Can’t wait to see them debate. Trump will probably cancel.
Nothing triggers Donald Trump (and MAGA) more than strong Black women. Period. Black women are at the intersection of the racism and sexism that so fuels Trump and his MAGA movement.
We’ve seen this for years with Trump’s demonization of visible Black female leaders from repeatedly calling Rep. Maxine Waters “low IQ” to vile attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar including calling for her to “go back” to where she came from and worse. And in 2020, after Kamala Harris was named Joe Biden’s running mate, Trump lashed out by playing on the angry Black women trope by calling her a “mad woman,” “so angry” and even a “monster.”
But now with President Biden stepping aside and the Democratic party rallying around Harris, Trump will for be the first time called to go head-to-head with Harris—and he must be petrified. Harris is the manifestation of all that scares Trump: She is a powerful, successful, smart Black woman.
Harris is also a former prosecutor who was elected in 2004 as District Attorney for San Francisco and in 2010 she was victorious statewide when she won the race to be Attorney General for the State of California. The contrast between prosecutor Harris and convicted felon Trump is perfect. And Harris has been the administration’s point person on reproductive freedom, which again is a powerful contrast to Trump who has bragged, “I’m the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade.”
Trump knows Harris could beat him. We all saw how Trump’s frail ego reacted when Biden beat him in 2020—he attempted a coup and incited the Jan 6 terrorist attack. The prospect of now losing to a Black woman has to shake Trump to the core—as does the prospect of ending up in prison.
That means we can expect Trump, his right-wing allies in Congress and the media to smear Harris non-stop with lies and bigotry. Mika Brzezinski shared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday that, “I’ve heard from inside Republican circles and right-wing media that the hate campaign against Kamala Harris has begun.”
In reality, though, the racist right wing smears of Harris began two weeks ago when GOP member of Congress Chip Roy, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka and a NY Post columnist Charles Gasparino all labeled Harris a “DEI” hire meaning she only got her job because of diversity mandates, not because she earned it. Gorka—while on national TV–even despicably referred to Harris as “colored.”
Gasparino went even further to say if Biden ended up stepping down as President, then, “Harris becomes the nation’s first DEI president by default.”
To the white right, it doesn’t matter that Harris has been a public servant for more than 20 years, winning election after election from DA, to California AG to the US Senate, where she distinguished herself with her service on the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. And of course, winning the 2020 election as VP.
Let’s be clear: Calling a person of color a DEI hire is what racism looks like. It springs from the white supremacist myth that people of color are inherently inferior to white people, hence, we can only achieve success and visible positions with the help of a program. (I was called a “quota hire” years ago on social media by a Fox News frequent guest because at the time I was the first Muslim hired to host a national radio show.)
When these people say “DEI hire,” in reality they are speaking in coded language to other bigots as the Mayor of Baltimore, Brandon Scott, who is Black, explained earlier this year. Scott, who some on the right have called a “DEI hire,” declared, “We know what these folks really want to say when they say DEI mayor,” adding bluntly, “They really want to say the N-word.” Mayor Johnson later gloriously trolled the bigots, saying on MSNBC that “DEI,” actually means “duly elected incumbent.”
The vitriol and bigotry that will be directed at Harris over the next 100 plus days until the Nov 5 election will likely far eclipse what we’ve seen to date. It will likely be worse than what was directed at Barack Obama given Harris is a woman.
These expected smears are designed to both delegitimize Harris as well as excite Trump’s bigoted, primarily white base. As Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University, said in 2020 in response to Trump’s calling Harris “angry,” “nasty” and a “monster,” these attacks are intended to undermine Harris as a leader and as a person. Cooper explained, “White supremacy is lazy and unoriginal and doesn’t feel the need to ascribe humanity to Black women.”
And Kelly Dittmar, with the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, in 2020 addressed the politics of Trump’s smears of Harris, saying, Trump is “speaking to a contingent of voters, particularly white male voters, who support him and who are key to his base.” She added, “We know from multiple studies done on the last election that their levels of both sexism and racial resentment were actually pretty strong indicators of their support for Trump.”
Trump never made a person a bigot. He only emboldens bigots to feel comfortable being the worst version of themselves. That means we can expect to see an ugliness over the next 100 days that will be revolting.
But we have the power to win this election. And by doing so, these right-wing bigots now calling Harris a “DEI hire” and other racist names–come January 20, 2025– will be forced to watch America call her, “Madame President.”
George Conway, ex-husband of Trump senior advisor KellyAnne, has created a website and group to call out Trump. It’s called “Anti-Psychopath PAC.”
Its first action was to create billboards on a mobile truck that circled the GOP convention in Milwaukee with a sign that said “Thanks for nominating a felon.”
It takes an insider to tell the truth. Conway is one of my personal heroes. He despises Trump, he loves Corgis.
After weathering criticism over its reliance on a gusher of Saudi cash, Jared Kushner’s investment fund made its first big splash last month when it announced it had signed a $500 million deal with the Serbian government to develop a high end real estate project in downtown Belgrade on the site of a bombed down army building destroyed during the 1999 Kosovo war.
But the fine print of the deal includes a commitment that seems destined to stir up even more international controversy: a pledge by Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, to construct a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression”— an allusion to the U.S.-backed bombing campaign that brought the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic to its knees a quarter century ago in response to its relentless campaign of repression and savage massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Among those exercised over the Kushner deal is retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the war.
While he has no objection to a U.S. firm investing in Serbia, the planned revisionist memorial—officially proclaiming America’s adversary in the war to have been a victim of “aggression”— “is worse than a reversal” of U.S. policies in the region, said Clark in an interview with SpyTalk. “It’s a betrayal of the United States, its policies and the brave diplomats and airmen who did what they could to stop Serb ethnic cleansing.”
Just as concerning as the whitewashing of Serbian war crimes, Clark said, is the just announced deal between Kushner’s firm and the Serbian government of Aleksander Vučić, a pro-Russian hardliner who once served as minister of information in Milosevic’s government. The memorial project needs to be viewed in a wider geopolitical context: It serves the Kremlin’s core interests in undermining NATO at a time the alliance is engaged in resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine.
“This is part of a broader Russian intelligence movement to split, discredit and weaken NATO,” Clark said. “It’s Russian imperial pushback…Should Kushner participate in this? Of course he should not.”
Neither Kushner nor representatives of his Miami-based firm responded to requests for comment. But the remarks by Clark are likely to draw further attention to a project that has generated strong criticism from Serbian opposition leaders as well as questions about potential conflicts of interest if Kushner’s father in law, Donald Trump (for whom he is once again raising money) is elected president in November.
Kushner’s partner in the deal is Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s Ambassador to Germany and who hopes to become Trump’s Secretary of State in a new administration.
Diane Ravitch's blog 