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a history-making change in the 2024 presidential race....

With Biden out of the 2024 race, what’s the Deep State’s next move?
The deeply unlikeable Kamala Harris has been tapped to get the Democratic nomination. Can her victory be ensured behind the scenes?

The 81-year-old US head of state has endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be picked as the Democratic Party nominee for the upcoming elections. Will this controversial shift drive a wedge between liberals long into the future?

 

BY ROBERT BRIDGE

 

Joe Biden’s eleventh-hour decision not to run marks a history-making change in the 2024 presidential race less than a month before the Democratic National Convention, which will kick off on August 19. Just after announcing that he would not be seeking the party’s nomination, Biden, who has said he would remain in the Oval Office until after a new leader is sworn in, announced in a tweet that Harris, 59, has his “full support and endorsement” to be the Democratic presidential nominee. This is where things promise to get ugly.

While Biden finally displayed the necessary amount of self-awareness to understand he is not physically and mentally fit to remain in office for another four years, Harris continues to delude herself that she is presidential material. The past four years have clearly and painfully proven that she is not. Not only did the vice president demonstrate her inability to perform simple functions, like effectually addressing a group of schoolchildren in what just might be the most cringe-worthy moment of her career, her own staff has raised serious questions about her office management skills. Meanwhile, Harris’s political instincts continually come up short at the most critical moments.

For example, one of her first major jobs as vice president was to oversee the crisis at the southern border, where millions of illegal immigrants are flooding into the US every year. Yet Harris waited over 100 days before paying a visit to the US-Mexico frontier. When pressed on the matter in an interview, she brushed off the oversight when she said, bafflingly, “And I haven’t been to Europe. And I mean, I don’t understand the point that you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.” It’s those sorts of uncomfortable exchanges that have kept the vice president’s likability and trustworthiness in the basement among voters.

A YouGov poll of 1,582 American adults conducted between July 13 and 16 revealed that 39 percent of respondents would vote for Harris if she was the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate, against 44 percent for Trump. This places Harris behind bumbling Biden, who the survey found would lose to Trump by 41 percent of the vote against 43 percent.

This is where the question about the future trajectory of the Democratic Party comes down to who is really in charge in Washington, DC at the moment. For those who believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been calling the shots for the past several years, I’ve got some hot property in Virginia Beach to sell you. The real powerbrokers behind the throne – the Deep State, if you will – who give Biden and Harris their marching orders, are comprised of the likes of the Clintons, Obamas, Pelosis, Schumers, and many others. While this may sound like a grand conspiracy theory, it’s not difficult to imagine that some of the most powerful and influential Democratic dynasties of the last century have serious sway over policy in Washington. Donald Trump, who knows a thing or two about how things work in DC, has suggested as much.

“You’ve been ripped off by everybody and betrayed by the globalists, Washington, Wall Street people, those combinations of Washington, Wall Street, they’re the worst of all,” Trump said last year at a New Hampshire event. “And it’s never been worse than it is now under crooked Joe Biden, and frankly, his boss, Barack Hussein Obama. I think it’s his boss.”

For the disbelievers, Obama fueled the speculation himself in 2020 when he told the late-night comedian Stephen Colbert, just before Biden was sworn in as president, that people would often ask him, “knowing what you know now, do you wish you had a third term?”

To which two-term Obama famously said, “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front-man or front-woman and they had an earpiece in and I was in my basement or sweats looking through the stuff and I could deliver the lines but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, I would be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.”

Some might call that a quaint description of how the ‘Deep State’ actually works behind the scenes, pulling the strings on puppet politicians they firmly control.

The Deep State is real,” wrote Jason Chaffetz, the former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “They don’t like exposure, accountability, or responsibility. They fight back, outlast, and work the system to their advantage.”

Whether or not the American political system has been victimized by such an operation is of the utmost importance for all Americans. But whether or not a person believes it to be true, they cannot deny that the most powerful names in Washington have one goal, and that is to prevent The Orange Man from getting anywhere near the Oval Office again. The question they are certainly asking themselves today is: can the first female, black and South Asian vice-president in US history pull off the task? My personal hunch is that they do not have much faith in Kamala winning a fair (and fair is the crucial word) no-holds-barred slugfest against the indefatigable Donald. Kamala simply lacks the composure and charm necessary for survival in the political jungle, as was clearly demonstrated in her 2000 run for the presidency when her polling numbers never escaped the basement, forcing her to leave the field before the primaries even began.

Unless. Yes, there is an unless. Unless the wily Democrats have ascertained beforehand that mail-in ballots, together with the millions of migrant voters anxious to support their benefactors, could guarantee victory to even the likes of Kamala Harris in a showdown against Trump. In that case, we could be looking at the first female US president (together with the possibility of a female VP, for example, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or maybe a male in the form of California Governor Gavin Newsom, whose super ego would probably preclude him taking the inferior role). Such a combination of factors could guarantee the Obama-run (?) Deep State at least another four years of calling the shots in Washington, DC from the shadows, with a weak and submissive leader formally in power. Stranger things have happened.

https://www.rt.com/news/601492-biden-us-presidential-race-kamala-harris/

 

 

SEE ALSO: https://www.rt.com/news/601456-kennedy-democrats-rigging-nomination/

enough delegates....

Harris has enough support from delegates to be Democratic nominee

 

Christal Hayes

 

Vice-President Kamala Harris has attracted the support of enough Democratic delegates to become the party's nominee for president, the BBC's US partner CBS News reports.

A survey by the Associated Press on Monday evening said Ms Harris had received the endorsement of more than the 1,976 delegates needed to win the nomination in the first round of voting.

Ms Harris said she was "proud" to have secured "broad support" and looked forward to formally accepting the nomination.

Delegates are people who are selected to represent their electoral area at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), the party's key nominating event.

Such endorsements are non-binding, but if the total holds between now and when delegates cast their votes, scheduled to take place from 1-7 August, Ms Harris would formally clinch the party's nomination.

Delegations from at least 27 states have issued statements of their full delegations supporting Ms Harris, according to CBS. 

The survey is an indication of the groundswell of support for Ms Harris after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday.

Since Mr Biden's announcement, millions of dollars in donations have poured into her campaign and leading Democrats have lined up to support her bid as the Democratic nominee. 

Speaking to staff at her campaign's headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, on Monday evening, Ms Harris told campaign staff: "We have 106 days until Election Day and in that time, we have some hard work to do." 

Ms Harris took the team through her vision of the country and the views that she says separate this campaign from Trump's, saying she would gladly put her record up against his. 

"Our campaign has always been about two different versions of what we see as the future of our country," she said. "One focuses on the future, the other focuses on the past. Donald Trump wants to take our country backwards... We believe in a brighter future that makes room for all Americans."

She also noted Mr Biden's accomplishments, saying her time serving as his vice-president was "one of the greatest honours of my life". 

Ms Harris noted the "roller coaster" of "mixed emotions" they've all been on because "I love Joe Biden, and I know we all do". She promised she'd work hard to earn the nomination for president and unite both Democrats and the country as a whole.

Before Ms Harris took to the stage, Mr Biden made his first comments since dropping out of the 2024 election via phone call while isolating after contracting Covid-19.

He thanked aides and told them to "embrace" Ms Harris because "she's the best". 

"I know yesterday's news was surprising and hard for you to hear, but it was the right thing to do," Mr Biden told them. 

He acknowledged the team had "poured" their "heart and soul" into helping him stay in office for a second term but said, "I'm not going anywhere" and vowed to remain "fully engaged" in the campaign. 

"I'm hoping you'll give every bit of your heart and soul that you gave to me to Kamala," Mr Biden told them. 

"We still need to save this democracy," he said. "Trump is still a danger to this nation."

Mr Biden is due to return to the White House on Tuesday afternoon after self-isolating in Delaware.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51ywewzpz2o

 

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crummy record....

The presidential hopeful’s record in California undermines her claim to progressive credentials, says Marjorie Cohn.

This article was originally published on Consortium News July 9, 2019, when Sen. Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. She was later chosen by nominee Joe Biden as his running mate, has served as vice president since January 2021 and on Sunday was backed by President Biden to replace him at the top of the Democratic ticket in the November 2024 presidential election. The article examines Harris’ record as a district attorney and California’s attorney general.

 

By Marjorie Cohn
Truthout
July 9, 2019

 

Sen. Kamala Harris is rising in the polls after dramatically confronting former Vice President Joe Biden during the Democratic primary debate about his opposition to federally mandated busing for desegregation. 

The following week, however, Harris backed away from saying that busing should always be federally mandated, calling it just one “tool that is in the toolbox” for school districts to use. When asked to clarify whether she would support federal mandates for busing, she said: “I believe that any tool that is in the toolbox should be considered by a school district.” But Biden’s poll numbers are falling as a result of Harris’s theatrical attack.

Harris, who served as San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011 and California attorney general from 2011 to 2017, describes herself as a “progressive prosecutor.” Harris’s prosecutorial record, however, is far from progressive. 

Through her apologia for egregious prosecutorial misconduct, her refusal to allow DNA testing for a probably innocent death row inmate, her opposition to legislation requiring the attorney general’s office to independently investigate police shootings and more, she has made a significant contribution to the sordid history of injustice she decries.

Harris Tried to Whitewash Jail Informant Scandal

For years, perhaps decades, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, in cooperation with the Orange County District Attorney, or OCDA, planted teams of informants in jail to illegally elicit confessions.

Deputy sheriffs placed informants near defendants who were represented by counsel to obtain statements from them. Prosecutors were aware of this program and explicitly or implicitly promised benefits to informants. This violated the defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

In People v. Dekraai (2016) [when Harris was California AG], an informant in this program illegally obtained statements from the defendant. After the prosecutor agreed not to use the statements, Dekraai pled guilty to murder and was preparing his defense for a trial on whether he would get the death penalty. He asked the judge to find that the OCDA had a conflict of interest because of its involvement in the jail informant program.

Over a six-month period, the judge held two hearings and heard from 39 witnesses.

The judge found that many witnesses, including prosecutors and law enforcement officers, were “credibility challenged” about the nature of the informant program and their role in it. Some couldn’t remember, the judge determined, but “others undoubtedly lied.”

Thus, the judge concluded that the OCDA had a conflict of interest and recused the entire OCDA office, removing it from any further involvement in Scott Evan Dekraai’s case.

Kamala Harris, who at that time was serving as state attorney general, would then take over the prosecution of the death penalty phase of Dekraai’s trial. But Harris appealed the judge’s ruling and opposed the recusal of the OCDA.

In 2016, the Court of Appeal rejected Harris’s argument and upheld the trial judge’s recusal of the OCDA. The appellate court wrote in its opinion:

“On the last page of the Attorney General’s reply brief it states, ‘The trial court’s order recusing the OCDA from prosecuting Dekraai’s penalty phase trial was a remedy in search of a conflict.’ Nonsense. The court recused the OCDA only after lengthy evidentiary hearings where it heard a steady stream of evidence regarding improper conduct by the prosecution team. To suggest the trial judge prejudged the case is reckless and grossly unfair. These proceedings were a search for the truth. The order is affirmed.”

Attorney Jerome Wallingford represented a man who, like Dekraai, was a victim of the illegal Orange County jail informant program. 

“Harris should’ve done her job and investigated the informant program based on the findings of the Court of Appeal in the Dekraai case,” Wallingford told Truthout. “But instead, she tried to whitewash the scandal by protecting the DA and blaming the sheriff.”

The job of the attorney general is not to protect the DA. As chief law enforcement officer of the state, the attorney general’s duty is “to see that the laws of the State are uniformly and adequately enforced,” as mandated by Article V of the California Constitution. Harris violated her legal duty in this case.

Harris Minimized ‘Outrageous Misconduct’

Harris minimized “outrageous government misconduct” in People v. Velasco-Palacios (2015). The trial court found the prosecutor “deliberately altered an interrogation transcript to include a confession that could be used to justify charges carrying a life sentence, and he distributed it to defense counsel during a period of time when [the prosecutor] knew defense counsel was trying to persuade defendant to settle the case.” 

After the prosecutor snuck the fabricated confession into the record, it caused the defense counsel to urge the defendant to plead guilty, which undermined the trust the client had in his lawyer.

The trial judge determined that the prosecutor’s action was “egregious, outrageous, and shocked the conscience,” and dismissed the case. Harris’s office appealed. 

The Court of Appeal affirmed the dismissal, noting that “dismissal is an appropriate sanction for government misconduct that is egregious enough to prejudice a defendant’s constitutional rights.” 

Significantly, the appellate court stated that “egregious violations of a defendant’s constitutional rights are sufficient to establish outrageous government misconduct.”

But the Court of Appeal rejected Harris’s argument that if the conduct wasn’t physically brutal, it would not satisfy the “shock the conscience” standard required for dismissal.

Once again, Harris was covering up prosecutorial misconduct and ignoring the Supreme Court’s admonition in Berger v. U.S. that the duty of a prosecutor “is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”

Harris Opposed Investigations of Police Shootings

These cases are not isolated examples of Harris’s less-than-progressive record as a prosecutor.

“Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent,” University of San Francisco School of Law Professor Lara Bazelon wrote in a New York Times article titled, “Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor.’” 

Bazelon added, “Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”

After a federal judge ruled in 2014 that California’s death penalty system had become so dysfunctional it “violate[d] the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment,” Harris appealed the decision. As a result, California’s death penalty was upheld and remains in place today.

Harris refused DNA testing that could exonerate Kevin Cooper, a likely innocent man on death row, and she opposed statewide body-worn police cameras. Harris favored criminalizing truancy, raising cash bail fees and keeping prisoners locked up for cheap labor. 

She also supported reporting arrested undocumented juveniles to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, covering for corrupt police lab technicians and blocking gender confirmation surgery for a transgender prisoner. A U.S. District Court judge concluded that withholding the surgery constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

Many of Harris’s prosecutorial actions disproportionately hurt people of color.

Harris opposed legislation requiring the attorney general’s office to independently investigate police shootings resulting in death. In 2016, members of the California Legislative Black Caucus called on Harris to do more to strengthen accountability for police misconduct. 

Assemblyman Kevin McCarthy (D-Sacramento), a member of the Black Caucus, told The Los Angeles Times, “The African American and civil rights community have been disappointed that [Harris] hasn’t come out stronger on this.

Harris Helped ‘Foreclosure King’

Although many of Harris’s prosecutorial actions harmed people of color, a notable one helped the white “foreclosure king” — Steve Mnuchin, [who became] Trump’s Treasury secretary.

Mnuchin was CEO of OneWest Bank from 2009-2015. A 2013 memo obtained by The Intercept alleges that “OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.”

After a yearlong investigation, the California attorney general’s Consumer Law Section “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct.” In 2013, they recommended that Harris prosecute a civil enforcement lawsuit against the bank.

“Without any explanation,” Harris’s office declined to initiate litigation in the case.

Mnuchin donated $2,000 to Harris’s Senate campaign in February 2016. It was his only donation to a Democratic candidate.

In January 2017, the Campaign for Accountability claimed that Mnuchin and OneWest Bank used “potentially illegal tactics to foreclose on as many as 80,000 California homes,” and called for a federal investigation.

Harris wrote in her memoir, The Truths We Hold, “America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice.” 

She added, 

“I know this history well — of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law.”

Indeed, the public record indicates that as district attorney and later as attorney general of California, Harris has contributed to the injustice she claims to abhor.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, dean of the People’s Academy of International Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She sits on the national advisory boards of Assange Defense and Veterans For Peace. A member of the bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, she is the U.S. representative to the continental advisory council of the Association of American Jurists. Her books include Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral and Geopolitical Issues.

This article is from Truthout

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/22/kamala-harriss-distinguished-career-of-serving-injustice-2/

 

 

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woman on top...

US Vice-President Kamala Harris has gone on the offensive against Donald Trump in the first rally of her White House campaign, portraying November’s election as one between a former prosecutor and a convicted felon.

Speaking to a crowd of thousands in the battleground state of Wisconsin, Ms Harris likened her Republican opponent to fraudsters she said she had prosecuted.

Trump, meanwhile, assailed her work on the border, and posted on social media: “Lyin’ Kamala Harris destroys everything she touches!”

It comes a day after she secured the support of a majority of Democratic delegates, paving the way for her to become the party's nominee.

On Sunday afternoon, President Joe Biden announced he was withdrawing from the race and endorsed his vice-president amid mounting pressure from top Democrats and donors following his disastrous debate against Trump in late June.

The fledgling Harris campaign raised a staggering $100m plus (£77m) in the 36 hours after Mr Biden’s exit.

Adding to her momentum, a new national poll from Reuters and Ipsos shows her with a two-point lead over Trump, 44% to 42%.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn053pnv0k1o

 

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with Israel....

 

By Michael Arria / Mondoweiss

 

Vice President Kamala Harris has emerged as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination after Joe Biden dropped out of the race this past weekend and immediately endorsed her.

Harris has been a staunch supporter of Israel for years. In 2017 she addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference and reminded attendees that the first resolution she co-sponsored as a senator was aimed at combating “anti-Israel bias” at the United Nations.

“Let me be clear about what I believe. I stand with Israel because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations,” she told the crowd.

In 2018 she gave an off-the-record speech to the organization, but eventually released her comments.

In that speech she claimed that she raised money for the Jewish National Fund as a Girl Scout.

“Having grown up in the Bay area, I fondly remember those Jewish National Fund boxes that we would use to collect donations to plant trees for Israel,” she told the audience. “Years later, when I visited Israel for the first time, I saw the fruits of that effort and the Israeli ingenuity that has truly made a desert bloom.”

“The vast majority of people understand the importance of the State of Israel,” she added later. “Both in terms of its history and its present in terms of being a source of inspiration on so many issues, which I hope we will talk about, and also what it means in terms of the values of the United States and those values that are shared values with Israel, and the importance of fighting to make sure that we protect and respect a friend, one of the best friends we could possibly have.”

While running for President in 2019, Harris was praised by the lobbying group Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) for running to the right of Obama on the Iran deal.

On the campaign trail Harris told Kat Wellman, a voter affiliated with DMFI, that she would reenter the agreement but “strengthen it” by “extending the sunset provisions, including ballistic missile testing, and also increasing oversight.”

“I was very impressed with her. I thought she gave an excellent speech, she gave a very detailed, responsive answer to my question,” Wellman told a local paper after the exchange. “I’m pro-Israel, so I was I was very concerned and all about making sure we limit nuclear missiles in any country that could possibly destroy us all. I thought her answer was very good.”

Harris has condemned the BDS movement and claimed that is “based on the mistaken assumption that Israel is solely to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” However, she voted against an anti-BDS bill in 2019 citing First Amendment concerns.

After the October 7th Hamas attack, Harris publicly declared that Israel had the right to defend itself.

“Let me be also very clear, as I’ve said before: We cannot conflate Hamas with the Palestinian people,” she told reporters. “Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization.  Hamas has vowed to repeat October 7 until Israel is annihilated. No nation could possibly live with such danger, which is why we support Israel’s legitimate military objectives to eliminate the threat of Hamas.”

In June she hosted a screening of Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary Screams Before Silence, which is was promoted as “a documentary film on the sexual violence committed by Hamas” on October 7th, a film that’s been criticized for relying on information from the Israeli group ZAKA.

“We cannot look away and we will not be silent,” Harris said at the event. “My heart breaks for all these survivors and their families and for all the pain and suffering from the past eight months in Israel and in Gaza.”

Many expect Harris to continue largely continue Biden’s foreign policy. “In practice, we can expect the Republicans’ public agenda to be a blunt statement of their racism, while Democrats will be less forthright,” wrote Mitchell Plitnick shortly before the Biden announcement. “On the ground, there is good reason to believe that Democrats will want to continue the two-state delusion, while Republicans will encourage Israel to kill it once and for all with annexation.” 

Insofar as policy differences might exist, some have pointed to recent comments Harris has made about the assault.

In a March speech Harris called for a six-week “temporary ceasefire,” the first member of the administration to mention such a move. She’s also repeatedly called on the Israeli government to do more to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid.

In a recent interview with The Nation, Harris expressed sympathy for campus Gaza protesters saying that, while she didn’t “wholesale endorse their points,” she thought they were, “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza,” though she was quick to note she does not “wholesale endorse their points.”

The foreign policy team around Harris is also viewed as more progressive on foreign policy than Biden’s. Her National Security Advisor is Phil Gordon, who helped push for the Iran Deal when he worked for the Obama administration.

“I think he’s very much on the progressive wing of the national security continuum,” Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Jewish Insider in 2023. “He’s Obama redux.”

Uncommitted National Movement Leader Layla Elabed, and other progressive organizers, have already put out statements calling on Harris to embrace a shift in policy.

“For months, we’ve warned that Biden’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza would hurt his electability,” said Elabed. “Now, it’s crucial for Vice President Harris to take a clear stance against weapons for Israel’s war and occupation against Palestinians. Supplying weapons to Netanyahu’s regime makes a mockery of Democrats’ claims to fight against MAGA authoritarianism…”

“It’s time to align our actions with our values,” she added. “Vice President Harris can start the process to earn back trust by turning the page from Biden’s horrific policies in Gaza.”

https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/23/looking-at-kamala-harriss-record-on-israel/

 

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repackaging....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RGotooERTs

The Ingraham Angle 7/23/24 FULL END SHOW | BREAKING FOX NEWS July 23, 2024

 

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