Kamala!

The big news of the day is that Joe Biden announced his running mate is Kamala Harris. She’s the first female person of color on the presidential ticket. I’ll be honored to vote for her in October (yeah, I know Election Day is Nov. 3, but to vote at home one must do it a few days ahead, which means October).

The campaign has released a photo of Biden asking Harris. He’s at his desk and she is seen on his laptop. There was lots of comments about the comic strip seen under the lamp and behind the laptop. That’s explained in the comments in this post.

In contrast to Joe and Kamala…



Joan McCarter of Kos reported that back in March the Families First Act gave states flexibility to changes SNAP (food stamps) to maximize assistance. It allowed newly unemployed to get help right away and did away with the need to continually prove that assistance was still needed.

Now the Department of Agriculture, which runs SNAP, says states have to go back to the old procedures. So at a time when need is going to increase a lot (the $600/week unemployment bonus has expired and not yet renewed) the states have to go back to mounds of paperwork and more stringent requirements. People will go hungry. This isn’t incompetence. This is malice.



Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos discussed the executive orders and memoranda the nasty guy signed last Friday. These were supposed to bring relief to American people because Congress can’t make it happen. But the stuff he signed actually does very little. So Eleveld mentions Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the GOP:

Next month, when Americans start sending in their ballots for early voting, they're going to look around and ask the question that Ronald Reagan famously posed in 1980: Are you better off than you were four years ago? And for anyone who isn't a GOP dead ender, they're going to know who is responsible for their misery—the guy in the Oval Office who was too incompetent to contain a pandemic on the front end and too indifferent to assist struggling Americans on the backend of his manmade disaster.

Hunter of Kos reports that the nasty guy and the GOP are showing what their fall campaign message will focus on. Hunter lists several things the GOP could highlight and won’t. The subject will be racism because they know no other subject, because they don’t know how to actually govern, and because it has worked in the past (see 2016).

It doesn't seem like it's going to work this time around. Not because the racism is any less motivational to the Republican base, mind you, but because the world is literally in absolute bats*** crisis right now and in order to even find time to be racist, even the Republican base has to weave through and over multiple more urgent priorities. It's harder to sell a notion of "the world will go to hell if my opponent wins" when the world is objectively hell-plus-three right now.

That doesn't mean it won't be tried. For starters, Donald Trump simply lacks the capacity to do anything else; he is a racist conspiracy freak by nature, and nobody among his rotating cast of aides and advisers has been able to bend his behavior in the slightest. The rest of the Republican Party has willingly chained themselves to Trump at the ankle, and not just will but must parrot whatever carnival phrases come out of his mouth or face his retaliation.