Kamala Come On

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My humble analysis is the new Democratic primary calendar favors Harris most. For starters her home state California moves from nearly last to Super Tuesday on March 3, 2020. South Carolina’s sizable Democratic black vote weighs in February 29 (where she is wisey doing her first event after her kickoff rally this weekend in Oakland CA). If she does well in Iowa Feb. 3, survives New Hampshire Feb. 11 and Nevada Feb. 22 the rest could be her history. And I’m already seeing signs she could win the Media Primary before the votes are counted.
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47 thoughts on “Kamala Come On”

  1. meanwhile, we’re all going to hell
    the guardian:
    Sir David Attenborough … […]
     
    Speaking at the start of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, the 92-year-old naturalist and broadcaster warned that human activity has taken the world into a new era, threatening to undermine civilisation.
     
    “I am quite literally from another age,” Attenborough told an audience of business leaders, politicians and other delegates. “I was born during the Holocene – the 12,000 [year] period of climatic stability that allowed humans to settle, farm, and create civilisations.” That led to trade in ideas and goods, and made us the “globally connected species we are today”.
    That stability allowed businesses to grow, nations to co-operate and people to share ideas, Attenborough explained, before warning sombrely: “In the space of my lifetime, all that has changed.
     
    “The Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more. We have changed the world so much that scientists say we are in a new geological age: the Anthropocene, the age of humans,” he declared.
     
    In a stark warning to the world leaders and business chiefs flocking to the WEF this week, Attenborough warned that the only conditions that humans have known are changing fast.
     
    “We need to move beyond guilt or blame, and get on with the practical tasks at hand.”
    […]
    “Over the next two years there will be United Nations decisions on climate change, sustainable development and a new deal for nature. Together these will form our species’ plan for a route through the Anthropocene.
     
    “What we do now, and in the next few years, will profoundly affect the next few thousand years,” he added.
     
    Speaking to journalists after his speech, Attenborough warned that economic models needed to change. “Growth is going to come to an end, either suddenly or in a controlled way,” he explained, citing the old joke that anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth in finite circumstances is “either a madman or an economist”.
     
    He is also hopeful that he can change hearts and minds during his trip to Davos, pointing out that some delegates have more power than a nation state. “The enormity of the problem has only just dawned on quite a lot of people … Unless we sort ourselves out in the next decade or so we are dooming our children and our grandchildren to an appalling future.”

  2. I like Harris, been following her for a while.  I also like Klobuchar, been following her for several years.  The only male Dem I have seen who could do a presidential run and has few negatives is the former governor of Colorado, Hickenlooper. 
     
    Many of the declared Dems are not in the same league.  A few are of the “what the hell are they trying to do? Sell a book?” category.  I wish we did have a bench full of younger (say fiftyish) people with the experience of a Clinton or Biden.  Both need to become the wise teachers, the party elders who support but no longer run. 

  3. I’m impressed with Harris and Klobuchar.  Of course until debates and primaries commence we really don’t have much of a sense of who’s gaining traction. I would not be surprised to see a 3 way Donnybrook with them and Biden. We’ll see. 

    Meanwhile, here’s the SFB voter writ large. 

    Ken Janicki, a 66-year-old retired technology worker who voted for Trump, sipped his coffee the other day and put it in blunt terms.
     
    “I am all for border security, a full wall around this country,” he said. “You come in legally, I’ll welcome you to be my neighbor. But you come in illegally, and I’ll introduce you to my friend Smith and my other friend Wesson.”

    Sweet, right? ?

  4. Wondering, while enjoying the lingering yummy flavor of my scrambled eggs and sausage breakfast, would the small percentage of Americans who are trumpists notice anything about a person if that person was wearing a maga hat?  Could we send a few thousand of those stupid hats to Mexico so people could walk over the border to California or Texas or even Florida (the governor wants a wall too)? 

  5. looks like some Canadians like her too according to Toronto star:  Kamala Harris’ Montreal high school alma mater cheers her presidential bid
     
    A suburban Montreal high school is leading the cheers north of the border for graduate Kamala Harris, the California senator and former prosecutor who confirmed Monday she’s seeking to become the first black woman elected president of the United States.
    “Run Kamala Run!!” Westmount High School’s social-media feeds gushed after Harris confirmed what much of the rest of the U.S. had assumed: she plans on being the Democrat who pries President Donald Trump out of the White House in 2020.

    In a memoir Harris describes the heartache of moving from Oakland to chilly Montreal so her mother Shyamala Gopalan, a breast-cancer researcher, could take a job at McGill University.
    “The thought of moving away from sunny California in February, in the middle of the school year, to a French-speaking foreign city covered in 12 feet of snow was distressing, to say the least,” she writes in The Truth We Hold: an American Journey, released earlier this month.
    Her initial foray into Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a school for native French-speakers, was a challenge: “I used to joke that I felt like a duck, because all day long at our new school I’d be saying, ‘Quoi? Quoi? Quoi?’ “

    By the time she was enrolled at Westmount, Harris had mostly adjusted to her life in Quebec, recalling fondly how her by-then divorced parents both attended her graduation, her mother resplendent in a bright red dress and heels.

    “We’re super happy, we’re super proud — we’re always happy when a Westmount grad does well,” said teacher Sabrina Jafralie, whose school counts songwriter Leonard Cohen, former Conservative cabinet minister Stockwell Day and prime ministerial spouse Mila Mulroney among its famous alumni.
    “I think she’s a role model for all of us. Coming from a great school like Westmount, possibly to the White House, is a great story to tell.”

    It’s no accident that Harris, whose mother is from India and father from Jamaica, chose Martin Luther King Jr. Day to confirm her plans, which she did during an appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America.
    “My parents were very active in the civil-rights movement, and that’s the language that I grew up hearing,” she said.
    “(King) was aspirational like our country is aspirational. We know that we’ve not yet reached those ideals. But our strength is that we fight to reach those ideals … We are a country that, yes, we are flawed, we are not perfect, but we are a great country when we think about the principles upon which we are founded.”

    [….]
    During a question-and-answer session at Howard University in Washington, Harris acknowledged having regrets about some decisions during her tenure. But her office also introduced a number of initiatives to address racial profiling and bias in law enforcement, as well as sentencing reforms, she said.
    “Instead of deciding either you’re soft on crime or tough on crime, let’s understand that if we’re going to be smart with the taxpayer’s dollars, let’s get people out of the system instead of cycling through the revolving door of jail,” she said. “One of my biggest regrets is that I’ve not had more time to do more, but it’s my intention to keep fighting for it.”

  6. do wish kamala and her candidate colleagues would turn their obvious talents toward working the system to get the system working again.   make a nice photo op if all of them would team up on senate floor for a hard press to transform mitch’s new trump bill into something palatable for the house to approve.  

  7. huffpo:  George Conway Mocks Rudy Giuliani’s Backpedaling With Brutal 5-Word ‘Translation’
     
    On Monday, Giuliani tried to walk back his previous claim that Trump had conversations about a possible Trump Tower project in Moscow throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. On “Meet the Press,” the former New York City mayor said that Trump can “remember having conversations” on the subject with disgraced former attorney Michael Cohen throughout 2016. 

     

    “There weren’t a lot of them, but there were conversations,” said Giuliani, who is an attorney for Trump. “Can’t be sure the exact date. … Probably up to ― could be up to as far as October, November.”

     

    But on Monday, Giuliani said his comments were “hypothetical” and “not based on conversations” with Trump. Conway offered a “translation” of Giuliani’s comments, summing it all up in just five words:  

    Translation:  “I just made s**t up.”
     
    Conway also retweeted a number of criticisms of Giuliani, then added a couple more of his own: 
    sounds like he needs a good lawyer
    Not only that, this seems to have Rudy saying that “through November 2016” is what Trump’s written answers to Mueller say.  That would be un-walk-backable.  Nothing computes here.
     
    Conway also roasted Giuliani on Sunday for saying it would be “perfectly normal” for Cohen to discuss his Congressional testimony with Trump prior to the hearing. Conway called it “perfectly insane.”  

  8. keep getting emails from kamala campaign.  they must have been given or bought and are recycling Hillary’s list.   am tempted to answer same way Nancy responds to Donald:  stop the shutdown and we’ll talk

  9. business insider via msn:  Meet the Sacklers, one of the richest families in America, who built their $14 billion fortune off of controversial prescription drug OxyContin
     
    The Sacklers are one of the wealthiest families in the US, but you’ve likely never heard of them.
    They might not have the name recognition of some of America’s wealthiest families, such as the Waltons or the Rockefellers, but those who haven’t heard the Sackler name have almost certainly heard of the source of their wealth: OxyContin, the controversial prescription painkiller.
    The Sackler family founded Purdue Pharma, which launched the drug in 1996. The original founding brothers, Raymond Sackler and Mortimer Sackler, died in 2010 and 2017 respectively. Their family still completely owns the company and shares an estimated $14 billion fortune, according to Forbes. But as The New York Times noted, the exact number is not known, as Purdue Pharma is a private company.
    The Sacklers are not a tight-knit family. The Guardian described them in 2018 as “a sprawling and now feuding transatlantic dynasty.” While some Sacklers serve as board members of Purdue Pharma, others, notably those descended from eldest brother Arthur M. Sackler, who died before OxyContin was invented, have distanced themselves from the company and condemned the OxyContin-based wealth, according to The Guardian.
    But a 2018 investigation by The Atlantic found a court document that showed a nearly $20 million payment to Arthur M. Sackler’s estate in 1997 from the Purdue family of companies, suggesting his descendants did benefit in some way from OxyContin.
    In an email to Business Insider, Janet Wootten, a spokesperson for Jillian Sackler, widow of the late Arthur M. Sackler, denied that Jillian, Arthur, or their heirs have financially profited from the sale of OxyContin.
    In a 2017 New Yorker article about the Sacklers titled “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” Patrick Radden Keefe noted the Sacklers are actually more well-known for their philanthropy.
    At Yale University, there’s a Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical and Engineering Sciences and a Richard Sackler and Jonathan Sackler Professorship of Internal Medicine. A $3.5 million endowment to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City earned them the Sackler Wing. There’s a Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

  11. here’s the link to that 2017 new Yorker article “The Family that Built an Empire of Pain” and here’s an excerpt:
     
    It’s amazing how they are left out of the debate about causation, but also about solutions,” Allen Frances, the Duke psychiatrist, said of the Sacklers. “A truly philanthropic family, looking at the last twenty years, would say, ‘You know, there’s several million Americans who are addicted, directly or indirectly, because of us.’ Real philanthropy would be to contribute money to taking care of them. At this point, adding their name to a building—it rings hollow. It’s not philanthropy. It’s just a glorification of the Sackler family.” According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, more than two and a half million Americans have an opioid-use disorder. Frances continued, “If the Sacklers wanted to clear their name, they could take a very substantial fraction of that fortune and create a mechanism for providing free treatment for everyone who’s become addicted.” Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, created the Nobel Peace Prize. In recent years, several philanthropic organizations run by the descendants of John D. Rockefeller have devoted resources to addressing climate change and critiquing the environmental record of the oil company he founded, now called ExxonMobil. Last year, Valerie Rockefeller Wayne told CBS, “Because the source of the family wealth is fossil fuels, we feel an enormous moral responsibility.”
    Mike Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general, believes that the Sacklers will feel no pressure to emulate this gesture until more of the public becomes aware that their fortune is derived from the opioid crisis. Moore recalled his initial settlement conference with tobacco-company C.E.O.s: “We asked them, ‘What do you want?’ And they said, ‘We want to be able to go to cocktail parties and not have people come up and ask us why we’re killing people.’ That’s an exact quote.” Moore is puzzled that museums and universities are able to continue accepting money from the Sacklers without questions or controversy. He wondered, “What would happen if some of these foundations, medical schools, and hospitals started to say, ‘How many babies have become addicted to opioids?’ ” A baby with a physical dependency on opioids is now born every half hour. In places like Huntington, West Virginia, ten per cent of newborns are dependent on opioids. A district attorney in eastern Tennessee recently filed a lawsuit against Purdue, and other companies, on behalf of “Baby Doe”—an infant addict.
    Purdue executives won’t be able to settle every case against them, Moore believes. “There’s going to be a jury somewhere, someplace, that’s going to hit them with the largest judgment in the nation’s history,” he said. Paul Hanly noted that, in the face of a crippling judgment, Purdue may have to declare bankruptcy. “But I’m certainly not going to walk away if they do,” he said. “At that point, I would start looking closely at individual liability on the part of the Sacklers.”
    Robin Hogen, the former Purdue communications executive, said, “I don’t want to be portrayed as an apologist for what is clearly a public-health crisis. But I wanted to make sure you spoke to someone who had very high regard for the Sackler family. The Sacklers were first class in everything they did.” I asked him what he would say to the doctors and the public-health officials who believe that the heirs of Raymond and Mortimer Sackler bear some moral responsibility for the epidemic. “I’m not a doctor,” Hogen demurred. “I really can’t comment.”
    The Sacklers have always excelled at the confidence game of marketing, and it struck me that the greatest trick they ever pulled was to write the family out of the history of the family business. I was reminded of Arthur Sackler’s admonition that you should endeavor to leave the world a better place than it was when you came into it, and I wondered about the moral arithmetic of the Sacklers’ deeds. But the family, through a Purdue representative, declined to comment.

  12. I really like Kamala Harris.  It’s nice to see multiple women throwing their hats in the ring.  Can’t wait to see the debates.
     
    patd….  LOVE the suggestion that Warren, Klobuchar, and Harris team up on the Senate floor to demand the reopening of our government.
     
    Bink…  I missed that wonderful Halsey video was for me.  Thanks so much…  you keep this old lady up on what’s current.  

  13. The more I look at the calendar the more I think this race will be over within a month after Iowa. When you consider how many states across the country vote March 3 on Super Tuesday it really is the closest we’ve ever come to a national primary. Whether on purpose or not the DNC has created a remarkably front-loaded season. Don’t expect the rest of the nation to be able to make much of a difference. Not much opportunity for unknowns to emerge in a crowded field.

  14. Also…  Craig… by Harris surviving New Hampshire will most likely mean she comes in second or third.  Since most of our news comes from Boston stations, we are all very familiar with Warren.  My bet is that Warren will come in first here because of the many times we see her on television.

  15. And then there is the money. I’d say by this November it will take at least 20 million dollars cash on hand to compete in the first month of voting. At a minimum. The Money Primary is going to be brutal for unknowns.

  19. Craig… then the Democratic Party is doing a Super Sunday.  Either that or wikipedia got the date wrong.  Just look at a calendar…  

  22. Kamala will always have California but not San Francisco
    I think she has a good chance based on the primary calendar she is not my first choice but I would support her against you know who any day of the week.
    I wonder if Oprah will campaign for her.

  24. Craig….   my bad….  I’m looking at the 2019 calendar.  I guess I just want to get it over with 🙂

  25. When she was DA in SF and in the beginnings of her career – she associated herself with people who I feel should have been run out of town.  
    Also like Gavin Newsom she would latch on to an issue because it gave her press attention but then would only do the things that benefited her forward motion but not necessarily that of the issue.  She and Biden can go on the same apology tour for their past positions on criminal justice issues.
     
     

  27. Harris seems cool, analytical, and super smart. My question would be is she inspirational? Can she draw skeptical voters to her campaign? If she can she will be very formidable.

  28. I saw an interview with Heidi Heidkamp and she was asking the same questions Jace is   only she used the word charisma

  30. Yeah well she was running against another Democrat – in that race Harris was the Republican – you may think that is a good thing

    Harris is doing a good job out of the block – lots of online volunteer recruitment and the actual kick-off in her hometown of Oakland. I think Democrats have a favorable view of her from various televised hearings. I have never heard her give a speech so I have no idea if she is any good

  31. Feeling old (again) – watching Youtube videos about rebuilding/building horse drawn buggies, wagons and sheep herder wagons.  I remember them in use, the names of all the parts and how it all is built, rebuilt and fixed.  Then I change to watching wood boat repair/rebuild/build and once again know what is going on.  Very few Gen X Y and Millennial will know that unless they apprentice on purpose.  My learning was because that was life back fifty, sixty years and more, living on the edge of modern and traditional farm and fishing life.

  32. Is she a rock-star?  If not, keep looking.
    Americans want celebrities to worship, not wonks.

    I nominate Benicio Del Toro.

  33. BB, when I was a kid during the War, horse drawn wagons hauled the milk, bakery. ice, coal, trash and garbage wagons through my Ohio city.

  34. I just saw a clip from an interview between Savannah Guthrie and the Salmann kid from Kentucky. He strikes me as just another arrogant and disingenuous teenager who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.

  35. What weather we’re having here. It was 7 degrees F this morning & will be 55 degrees F tomorrow. Is a 48 degree swing in temps in 30 hours normal?

  36. That kid’s family hired a “crisis management firm”, from what i read, pogo.  They’ve been coaching him and feeding him talking points.
     

  41. Well, Pogo, you can only do so much with the materials at hand. 
    Looks to me like a lot of stupid going around. The  boys excuse was that they were a bunch of teenage boys, the definition of stupid. But what about the old man with the drum What was his excuse? And don’t tell me he was trying to stop anything. his actions give a lie to that just like the boys action give lie to his claims of peace making.  He was a crazy old man with a drum and from the way the boys were behaving with their war whoops and dancing that is what they believed. So you take a bunch of bored teenage boys,  a crazy old man  banging on a drum and chanting somethin incomprehensible and  the “black Israelites”  throwing obscenities every where. What do you think is going to happen?
    The real question is where were the adults? Chaperones are there to stop these kind of things, get the kids out of there before trouble starts. With all the maga swag they had gotten at the march they were obvious targets for any huckster political activist wanting to make a name for himself. And obviously somebody did just that,
    Jack

  42. Jack, interesting perspective. While it’s been an awful lot of years, I can remember being a stupid teenage boy. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. Now I’m a crazy old man. I don’t have a whole lot more idea what the fuck I’m doing now than I did when I was a stupid teenager boy. Put it all together and what are you got? Stupidity. Good point

  43. Mr Pogo,
    Today you possess an enormous reservoir of experience and learning. You are easily able to identify stupid when you see it. That is a skill that teenage boys lack. 
    As a corollary, you have significantly raised the stupid bar. You are able to tell grossly stupid that which fully 40% of the adult population mis-identifies as brilliant. 
    I’d choose your stupidity over most people’s ‘genius’ and hour of the day.

  44. Mr Jack,
    You asked about the alleged chaperones. Apparently, those chaperones were only present to prevent their charges from having sex or abortions. 

  45. What if the unidentified russian-owned company in the sealed motions is trump inc ? That would explain the need to keep the proceedings secret, and to keep even the attorneys’ names under seal. It would explain everything.

  46. I stand with Ms Cracker re Sen. Kamala Harris. She may be a prodigious fund raiser, but I do not put her high on the list of potential candidates. I put Brown, Klobuchar, Castro, Warren, Inslee, and Landrieu ahead of her. Way ahead. That’s my half dozen. Harris, like Gillibrand, has too damn much past to explain.
    I love Biden, but he’s past shelf date. He’d make a great VP candidate to soothe the nerves of old folks. I’m also a huge fan of Stacey Abrams, but coming out of a state legislature is not a good enough resume. I think she’d make a great VP candidate, if teamed with Brown or Inslee. To me, Beto is a future US senator or governor of Texas. Sanders is too old, and Warren pumps all the air out of his campaign. 
    ANY Dem will get my vote against any ripper. Lock ’em ALL up !

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