From one native California girl to another: You go Kamala! I think she's a great choice. She will eat Pence alive at the debate. An intelligent, educated, strong woman against the Albino Potted Plant. He won't know what hit him.🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊

Hard to say which of these made me laugh harder but the ones about the Zoom meeting and Trishyla calling Pence the Albino Potted Plant sure are neck and neck. Wish Kavanagh could be dethroned though I think Roberts does a nice job of canceling him.

So glad Kamala will get to debate Pence and he might need his wife holding his hand so he doesn't crap his pants. Do you think she'll let him on the stage with Kamala?

Omar has finally learned that the tropes she'd been using were anti-Semitic, and she is no longer using them. Just like the way many white people don't realize the racist origins of expressions like "grandfather clause," "master bedroom," or "master-slave" (in the context of describing the relationships between certain electric switches). But now we do and are learning neutral substitutes.

So Benito Adolf Drumpf's campaign is treating Harris like the second coming of AOC, calling her a socialist. OTOH, many progressives (at least while she was still running for President) thought she was a police-loving centrist. If she managed to piss off both sides like that, she must be doing something right. (And it's much easier to tread the middle way--or at least the classic liberal path--as a running mate than as a candidate for the top job). An Alameda County Public Defender went on Maddow tonight and said that Harris was the most progressive prosecutor she'd ever faced.

I'm relieved he didn't pick Whitmer or Warren--they would have caused his most loyal base to sit out the election, considering it a tone-deaf slap in the face. Besides, Whitmer is more valuable to MI as Gov.--she wouldn't have reliably delivered MI into the blue column because she didn't carry the Upper Peninsula or the north part of "the Mitten" (incl. Grand Rapids, aka DeVos-land) when she ran for Gov. And Warren is at her best as a gadfly--I can't see her doing anything diplomatic. And Harris, at 55, is a Gen-Xer, whereas baby-Boomer Warren is a year older than I am.

It's never "firm"--Pres. candidates can, and have ditched running mates midstream. Remember 1972 "McGovern/Eagleton?" All was hunky-dory till it became known that Eagleton had once suffered from depression and received ECT, aka shock therapy--back then the only antidepressants were MAO inhibitors, which had massive and often permanent side effects (like uh, death, if certain foods were eaten with them), so ECT was the gold standard). Suddenly, there were all kinds of cruel jokes (I remember Natlamp suggested a bumper sticker reading "Volt for Eagleton"). So Tom Eagleton was shamed into withdrawing from the ticket in favor of "Kennedy-by-marriage" and Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver, a newbie to elective office. The ticket had all the charisma of a sopping wet Sham-Wow. And though McGovern wasn't exactly Mr. Personality himself, he cost himself quite a few votes by his tone-deafness (some might say cruelty) on the emerging phenomenon of mental health issues.

If being spineless made one medically unfit for office, we could get rid of quite a few Senators as well.

I'm overjoyed by Joe's pick of Kamala! She was my choice during the primaries, but now its time to move on and celebrate this awesome ticket! I heard that the Biden/Harris campaign raised 10.8 million after the announcement yesterday!

YES!

Hopefully we will Ruth. Let's take the senate too!

LOVE KAMALA HARRIS!!! SHE IS SO COOL! I LOVED HER DURING THE SENATE HEARINGS-- 0R WAS IT THE BRETT K. CONFIRMATION THING?......OR BOTH??? SHE IS SO TOUGH AND WHOLLY WINNING....AND THIS BELOW OF HER INTERVIEWING BARR...CLASSIC....

Americans Need To Get Out of This Abusive Relationship

August 12, 2020August 12, 2020 / John Pavlovitz

It's heartbreaking to see someone you love in a toxic relationship: watching them be continually torn down and berated, treated with complete disregard, humiliated publicly over and over again—and knowing that despite how much damage has been inflicted, they will likely stay with their abuser, to their own detriment.

There is a unique kind of helplessness when a human being is so blinded by their past hopes about what the other person would become, that they can't see what they actually are presently; when they are so consumed with the story they've told themselves about the heart of their partner, that no amount of evidence to the contrary will be enough to convince them otherwise.

They will be lied to and gaslit and injured—and still they will fiercely defend the object of their misplaced affections; perhaps because they do not see their own worth and imagine they will not find better, or because fear has paralyzed them into inaction, or because living this way for so long has left them unable to see another possibility.

When they are confronted by the efforts of well-meaning people, they will deny and rationalize and even lash out at the very suggestion that they are being manipulated, rather than face the possibility that they have been fooled by someone they misjudged and trusted. It is exhausting to try and help them extricate themselves from their own hearts, to show them how unhealthy this place is, to wake them up to their greater value.

Nearly 40 percent of this nation is in an abusive relationship with this President and they are the only ones who cannot see it.

He has complete contempt for them and yet they passionately defend him. They cut ties with those who attempt to reach them with the evidence of his betrayal. Though they are being daily devalued and damaged, they cannot see it through the intoxicating romantic haze of their Fox News, Evangelical, Great America back stories. They see those of us who oppose him as the enemy, when the truth is we care far more about them than he ever will—which is why we have to show up in November and help them see what they cannot right now.

This election is the chance for the sixty percent of us to rescue these people from this bitter codependence; to vote them into a safer and more stable place; to show them what it could be like if they were led by someone who actually cares for their well being, who actually works to strengthen the bonds between them and the people around them, who will not subject them to a continual toxic flood of intimidation in order to keep them close and retain their affections.

Whenever someone finds their way out of an abusive relationship, you watch them blossom: you see them embrace the wide-open life that has always been waiting for them, and they get to see themselves and the world with new eyes. Like a mighty Phoenix rising from the suffocating ashes of something that was far less than they deserved, their spirits are reborn—and they wonder how they ever let themselves be treated as anything less than beautiful. They find real freedom.

I so want these people around me to experience this, for them and for the America that I share with them. We all deserve far better than the oppressive, violent, fractured place we now live in, and until they see that we're stuck here.

The best of who we could be as a nation is not possible while they are tethered to something so destructive and injurious, and the greatest gift we can give them is to save them from themselves.

That's what's at stake in this election: everything.