MOSCOW (Sputnik) - US Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is in "excellent" health, her physician, Joshua Simmons, said in a medical summary published by the White House on Saturday, just weeks before the election.

"Vice President Harris remains in excellent health. She possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency, to include those as Chief Executive, Head of State and Commander in Chief," the summary read.

Harris, 59, maintains a healthy lifestyle, including daily sport and healthy diet, the report reads, adding that her most recent annual physical exam, taken in April, detected no problems.

Over the last three years, Harris has been on allergen immunotherapy which helped to "dramatically" improve her allergy symptoms so that she will not be needing medication anymore, apart from occasional nasal drops for rhinitis, Simmons said.

The release of Harris' medical history follows a long-standing practice by candidates of both parties, which included Donald Trump during his presidency and previous campaigns. Trump, her 78-year-old Republican rival, has avoided requests to publish his medical records since August.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20241012/allergies-defeated-presidency-next-kamala-harris-health-report-is-in-1120524788.html

WE ARE IMPRESSED... BUT ACCORDING TO THE DEMOCRATS, TRUMP IS MENTALLY DEFICIENT WHILE ACCORDING TO REPUBLICANS, KAMALA IS AS THICK AS A FALLING BRICK.... HER LAUGHTER SHOULD BE TREATED AS A DISEASE...

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Standing in the tiny foyer of a small theatre that had seen better days on a residential street in inner-city Philadelphia, I asked a fellow theatre-goer standing next to me, “Are you looking forward to some comic relief?”

“You bet,” the man said.

He and his companion, both apparently of retirement age, had come all the way from the suburbs to see This Is the Week That Is: An Election Special, a sketch comedy written, produced and performed by the local Philadelphia theatre company 1812 Productions and comprising a series of partly improvised parodies revolving around the November 5 presidential election.

“Would there be many Trump voters in this crowd?” I asked, noticing that the foyer was rapidly filling up.

“No way,” the woman laughed. Then the man chimed in. “They won’t get any joy from this. Too much fact-checking. They don’t like fact-checking!”

He then added, “You know, when Walz was fact-checked about whether he was at Tiananmen, he just said he had made an error. When Vance was fact-checked, he just lied more.”

Philly is usually a blue city, but the woman I was talking to has noticed that about one out of ten yard-signs displayed in front of people’s houses on her street proclaimed their support for Trump.

Jennifer Childs is the founder of 1812 Productions, and co-creator and head writer of this production. She and the show’s director, Melanie Cotton, both acknowledge that election cycles can be “anxiety-producing,” and that audiences coming into the theatre would be worried about the election. Childs said she wanted her show to be therapeutic: having done plenty of comedies that are escapist—just come and don’t think about anything and laugh at something stupid for two hours.

It was obvious they achieved their goal. Everyone, including the couple who had talked to me earlier, walked out with smiles, their facial muscles visibly more open and relaxed than when they went in.

According to a poll from as early as May this year conducted by the American Psychiatric Association, 73 per cent of Americans said the election was already causing them anxiety. It is unsurprising, then, that anxiety levels only seem to be intensifying as the election draws closer.

One Philly resident said she believed that the anxiety recorded in May might have “evolved into a more complex combination of emotions including fear, hopelessness, uncertainty feeling frozen and worrying about what’s to come.” Kathryn, with a background in education, seemed hard pressed to decide which would be the more scary scenario: Trump winning, with his emboldened supporters possibly unleashing their violent energy on their opponents (not to mention what might happen to immigrants and women); or Trump losing, potentially leading to widespread violence from angry supporters believing, once again, that the election had been “stolen” from their candidate.

“There is this fear that whoever is elected, there is no winning,” Kathryn said.

Hotlines have been set up to help people in Philly suffering from election anxiety and depression. Psychologists are advising people to limit their media exposure to no more than half an hour a day, to practise deep breathing, and to become engaged in campaigning. Many people resort to making agreements with families, friends and colleagues not to talk about politics, and some workplaces are offering training on how to handle political disagreements among employees.

While voter anxiety is across the board for both Trump and Harris voters, one survey suggests that Democrat voters report a higher level of stress, albeit for different reasons.

Spending just one evening talking to people at This Is the Week That Is made me realise that if I want to meet a big crowd of politically motivated people in Philadelphia on a weekend, my surest – and perhaps safest – bet might be to find another comedy in town about the forthcoming election.

So, the next afternoon I went to see another political satire, in the hope of finding out why Democrat voters are anxious despite the fact that Philly is a relatively safe blue city.

As it turned out, the Arden Theatre in downtown Philadelphia has also been doing its bit to relieve voters from election anxiety, by staging a Broadway hit called POTUS: Or Behind Every Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive. The show is described by the Washington Post as “located somewhere on the satirical dial between 9 to 5 and Veep.” With the election just under one month away, the timing of the show assumed increasingly urgent poignancy. Due to popular demand, it has been extended for another week in Philadelphia.

Director Jennifer Childs, also one of the stars and writers of the 1812 production discussed earlier, is acutely aware of the timing of the show:

POTUS will close before our presidential election in November. I have no idea what the outcome of that election will be. … My hope is that … [after the election] this beautiful and funny play will be irrelevant.

But will it? Will it indeed become irrelevant?

During the intermission, I asked Roxanne and Trish, the two women sitting next to me, if it was safe to assume that most of the audience were Democrat supporters. “Oh yes, I think so. With a cast of seven strong women, with a strong feminist undertone, Trump supporters just wouldn’t find it funny.”

But the laughing and camaraderie shared by the audience belied a pervasive, palpable anxiety. “You can feel the tension in the air. And that’s because Trump is so unpredictable.”

Another common refrain I’ve been hearing with increasingly frequency over the last few weeks here is, “You just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Roxanne is a regular theatre goer who decided to home-school her four children partly due to her concern about guns in the schools. After getting a teaching degree, she now teaches English to new migrants and refugees. For her, the uncertainty of not knowing what’s in the next news cycle is very anxiety-making.

Roxanne’s theatre-going buddy Trish is an African American woman who also home-schooled her children. Trish was disgusted with Trump’s – and his supporters’ – comments questioning Kamala Harris’ blackness.

She said she is now more worried after the Walz vs Vance debate:

Neither Trump nor Vance has ever admitted that the 2020 election was legitimately won. So, if Harris wins, Trump is not likely going to accept it peacefully. So, we may have riots or violence. If he wins, I don’t know what’s going to happen, especially with black women in this country. One way or another, it’s going to be difficult to predict.

Uncertainty aside, the other anxiety-inducing factor is the neck-and-neck closeness of many of the polls. Trish continued:

We’re told constantly that the margin between the two parties is now widening, and then it’s closing again. Or it’s getting closer in one state, or widening in another. It’s nerve-wracking.

Roxanne attributed her anxiety to the fact that anything can derail your preferred party’s chances.

First, it’s the disastrous performance from Biden. Then the Middle East. Then the assassination attempt. Then Harris stepped up. That was a relief, but we knew so little about her. Then the hurricane. And Trump never stops lying. You never know what’s around the corner. You’re always on edge.

In a way, Roxanne echoed what Kathryn said to me earlier about the broken trust, which seems to go to the heart of what is causing this widespread anxiety, at least on the part of Democrat voters:

Can you trust someone who likes to tell lies, distort history, tries to invalidate an electoral system that we rely on, and that other countries look to us as a symbol of democracy?

Kathryn’s question was meant to be rhetorical. But for many Americans the answer could still turn out to be a resounding – and alarming – “Yes.”

https://johnmenadue.com/anxious-democrat-voters-find-new-ways-to-self-medicate-as-election-looms/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

By Andrew P. Napolitano

The government knows how to evade an uncomfortable constitutional provision or High Court opinion, writes Andrew P. Napolitano regarding a case involving Donald Trump, Jack Smith and Elon Musk.

When Congress enacted the Stored Communications Act of 1986 (SCA), it claimed the statute would guarantee the privacy of digital data that service providers were retaining in storage. The act prohibited the providers from sharing the stored data, and it prohibited unauthorized access to the data, commonly called computer hacking — except, of course, if the recipients or the hackers were working for the federal government.

Just as it did with the Patriot Act of 2001 — which permits one federal agent to authorize another to conduct a search of stored data, without a judicially issued search warrant — the SCA permits judges to issue “orders” for searches without meeting the probable cause standard required by the Fourth Amendment.

Just like the Patriot Act — which in its original form prohibited the recipient of agent-issued search warrants, called National Security Letters (NSLs), from telling any persons of their existence — the SCA requires judges who issue orders for a search, upon the request of the government, to bar the custodian of the data who has received the order from informing the person whose data is sought.

What if the person whose data is sought has a claim of privacy on the data? What if the owner and creator of the data relied on the Fourth Amendment to keep the government’s hands off of it? What if that person was the president of the United States at the time he created the data? What if he has a claim of executive privilege on it? What if all persons have a privacy claim on all stored data and have a right to resist the government’s efforts to seek it?

Here is the backstory.

Is a judicial order for data under the SCA a search warrant under the Fourth Amendment? It is, after all, a judicial order directing and authorizing an official of the executive branch to surveil and seize private property, and it does specifically describe the place to be searched or the thing to be seized. But, because it is not based on probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires, the short answer is: No.

In United States v. Carpenter (2018), the Supreme Court ruled that orders for data based on governmental need, rather than probable cause of crime, are constitutionally defective and the data cannot be used at trial.

But the government, which knows how to evade an uncomfortable constitutional provision or Supreme Court opinion, has continued to use the SCA as a means around them. This became apparent this week in a case before the Supreme Court involving former President Donald Trump, Jack Smith and Elon Musk.

Two years ago, Smith, the special counsel prosecuting Trump for alleged Jan. 6 crimes, obtained an order from a federal judge in Washington, D.C., directing X — formerly known as Twitter — to surrender copies of communications sent and received by Trump in January 2021, and prohibiting X from informing Trump. 

This was not a search warrant, as it was not based on probable cause of crime. It was an SCA order based on governmental need.

The SCA is unconstitutional on its face. This is so because it directly defies the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees privacy by requiring a showing under oath of probable cause of crime as the absolute precondition of all government searches and seizures. Nevertheless, X complied with the order, but filed a secret application with the judge who issued it seeking to vacate the order for silence.

Government orders for silence have a long and troubled history. The same First Amendment that prohibits Congress from infringing upon the freedom of speech also prohibits the government from compelling speech. If Congress cannot infringe upon or compel speech, how can it compel silence? It cannot constitutionally do so.

In 2005, in Connecticut, librarians wound up ensnared by a National Security Letter (NSL). The Patriot Act prohibited the recipient of an NSL from telling anyone — even a lawyer — of the receipt of it.  When the librarians sued for the right to discuss the receipt of the NSL, the feds charged them with criminal violations of the Patriot Act by discussing the receipt of the NSL with their lawyers.

After a federal district court granted and a federal appellate court upheld the relief the librarians sought, and the criminal case against them was dismissed, Congress amended the Patriot Act to permit recipients of NSLs to discuss them with counsel. By then, five different federal judges had declared the silence provisions of the Patriot Act unconstitutional.

That should have been the end of commands for silence, but it wasn’t.

When lawyers for X argued that the SCA infringed upon Musk’s freedom of speech to tell Trump what the feds were up to, a federal district court rejected that argument and a federal appellate court upheld the rejection. X appealed to the Supreme Court, and the court — without an opinion or a dissent — declined to hear X’s appeal.

Here we go again. Doesn’t the Constitution mean what it says? Of what value are constitutional guarantees if those in whose hands we repose them for safekeeping secretly and repeatedly decline to do so? How does this end?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, was the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel and hosts the podcast Judging Freedom. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.

COPYRIGHT 2024 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO 

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/10/the-government-compels-silence-again/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.