Kamala Harris is (currently) the Vice-President of the United States

I have the distinct feeling we're gonna need this thread

Good morning!

Needs a poll of scenarios

Obama lasted out the full eight years. There is hope.

My implication was possible ascension to the presidency!

I expect this thread to become especially active in early 2023.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/27/politics/kamala-harris-vice-presidents-residence/index.html

It's unclear why the renovations are taking so long, said one administration official, but it's a situation that has left Harris increasingly and understandably bothered, according to several people who spoke to CNN about her situation.

I don't think there's any mystery here: as everyone suspected, Mike Pence is basically a one-man Led Zeppelin outside the office.

Don't ask him about the shark incident

Whole Lotta Pence

Don't ask him about the shark incident

check your sources, it's "I'm going to put this mangrove snapper into Mother's mangrove snapper."

...

Still true!

Unbelievable 😳 https://t.co/UHed5s2nsK

— Samplo Corvodina (@TreborRhurbarb) July 22, 2024

a prophet!

I have the distinct feeling we're gonna need this thread

― the serious avant-garde universalist right now (forksclovetofu), Monday, January 11, 2021

forks was on some nostradamus type shit back in the day

she just HAS to visit Uganda's capital one day.

iswydt

i liked harris before liking her was cool

that's a lie. i was deeply suspicious of harris before liking her was cool (because of her anti-sex-worker policies), and it is quite likely i will turn my back on her the second it becomes expedient for me to do so.

right now, though, i'm totally in the bag for her

she just HAS to visit Uganda's capital one day.

― StanM

but seriously folks, i grew up thinking of kamala the ugandan giant as totally normal and not at all a racist stereotype

it took me several years to stop mispronouncing kamala harris' name

i internalized a _lot_ of racist bullshit growing up and i'm doing the best i can to unlearn that crap

i, uh. i'm feeling some empathy for anybody in america who's Black right now cuz for at least the next couple months, and maybe beyond, they're gonna be hearing the most awful racist bullshit everywhere - like, above and beyond the usual level of awful racist bullshit in America, which isn't exactly low. any way you slice it, that's just gonna fuckin' suck.

it was just for the "Kamala in Kampala" headlines, that's all :(

oh lol

nvm

i wish it didn't bug me so much that joe biden called kamala harris "kid" yesterday. but given his age he probably calls everyone kid. i can't help it. it bugs me when older people do that. boomers do that to me all the time. even though i am creeping closer to retirement age. on the other hand, it makes an almost-60-year-old woman sound young. so, maybe its okay. still seems disrespectful in public. omg, i am so old-fashioned. i get it, he's folksy and doesn't stand on ceremony. but if she had said "thanks, old-timer" he would have been pissed. it goes both ways is all i'm saying!

dana bash just told CNN viewers to turn up their hearing aid while she explains Gen Z memes like BRAT.

(i have totally done that old-timer thing when older guys i don't know have called me "kid" or "young fella" and they always get huffy about it. rude me i rude you. i'm 55 friggin' years old!)

they can't help it. i have long hair. its societal. when i have short hair people treat me like a banker.

https://oag.ca.gov/history/32harris

She does the one handed egg cracking thing! Elect that woman!

Harris has a whole series of cooking videos on her YouTube and one thing I’ve learned so far is that she’s got the one-handed egg crack down. pic.twitter.com/oNzjeKIztY

— Jacob Rubashkin (@JacobRubashkin) July 22, 2024

thx to ilx I was alerted to the existence of BRAT and the coconut tree, so I did some research on them. i'm good for now. just let me know when the next Harris meme pops up, ok?

Ok, I am now in the bag for her.

Her fries look really good, too.

Confirming @KamalaHarris loves her fries. She makes them at home too...hand cut, double fried (peanut oil then duck fat) with rosemary and sage from our herb garden. Also gotta give a strong 👍 to @SenGillibrand for hers! https://t.co/SW6Zs4jn9W pic.twitter.com/Z8nCTtysVY

— Doug Emhoff (@DouglasEmhoff) June 20, 2019

Liz Warren and Kamala coming with the only two answers that aren't insane

^^^

I completely forgot about Kirsten Gillibrand

Williamson -- "nothing will bring me comfort or joy"

conspicuous and suspicious absence from Bernie and Joe there

omg buttigieg is such a phony. he and jd vance have a lot in common tbqf

i know everyone here hates williamson but personally i'm into her galaxy brain take on this one

Biden didn't participate, but Bernie said: "“There’s too much comfort food.”

https://www.grubstreet.com/2019/06/2020-candidates-comfort-food-is-the-most-haunting.html

lol my man

Gillibrand's comfort food is whiskey? What do you know, so is mine!

lol sanders

Bernie prefers discomfort food. He gets it at the inconvenience store.

i wish it didn't bug me so much that joe biden called kamala harris "kid" yesterday. but given his age he probably calls everyone kid.

― scott seward

this is one of my worse habits, and i work really hard to not do it. most trans people are younger than me, and if i see, like, a 22 year old, i wanna call them a "kid". i know that's disrespectful, but they just look 12 to me, the same way i probably look, like, 80 to them

dana bash just told CNN viewers to turn up their hearing aid while she explains Gen Z memes like BRAT.

― scott seward

god i didn't know diarrhea was such a problem for gen z

She does the one handed egg cracking thing! Elect that woman!

― StanM

you know i myself have a reputation for cracking eggs. got another one yesterday. you know her parents told her there was _no such thing_ as bottom surgery? smdh. i will never understand the stupid shit transphobes say.

(this time i am deliberately choosing to misunderstand what you said rather than just being dopey)

Bernie prefers discomfort food. He gets it at the inconvenience store.

― Millennium Falco (Ye Mad Puffin)

i mean i can't think of a more leftie concept than an "inconvenience store"

I like Bennett's Italian sando pick

I'm never going back to double-frying fries, to much oil. The progressive and efficient way to do fries is parboiling them first>then airfryer in lightly oiled batches>then a brief oven cook. Her fries do look good tho!

I looked up the Pass Key in Pueblo, where Bennett gets his sandwiches, and everything on the menu is comfort food.

lol Kate

just wanna point out there's a video of her visiting a record shop and showing off what she bought, one of the records is Roy Ayers' Everybody Loves the Sunshine which she says is one of her favorite albums of all time, just wanna say that is an amazing pick, fucking incredible album, Hillary Clinton would never

I'm never going back to double-frying fries, to much oil. The progressive and efficient way to do fries is parboiling them first>then airfryer in lightly oiled batches>then a brief oven cook. Her fries do look good tho!

Hm have never had much success with progressive, efficient and/or airfryer fries at all, but will try this path; thanks for tip!

Frogbs, the Kamala truthers are out there asking why she didn't already own it

she had it on CD, just wanted the vinyl to display in her listening room

FWIW... everybody loves the sunshine -- the song -- was a top 10 hit on the r&b charts when Kamala was young; she's on a nostalgia trip not a hipster trip. imo anyway.

I mean, she was signed to 4AD in the 80s

can we just take a moment to talk about the goth butch glory that was a young Kamala Harris 😍 pic.twitter.com/1bkcj21ZpB

— ts lil naminé (@likewhet) July 22, 2024

xpost to self, i am incorrect - it's the album that cracked the top 10 r&b chart, idk about the single.

Putting this here as well as the main politics thread because that one moves too fast — a good Rolling Stone interview with Harris, from June.

I mean, she was signed to 4AD in the 80s
― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Wednesday, July 24, 2024 3:20 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Love that pic, she really rocked the short hair and high-neck coat. Actually, you can see her sense of style in any picture. Can't hurt against the fast food unkemptness of DJP.

DJT

ian, she was picking up Mingus albuns as well tho!

Let My Children Hear Music isn't a focus grouped Mingus cut either!

Can't hurt against the fast food unkemptness of DJP.

shots fired

wait what, why me

"just wanna point out there's a video of her visiting a record shop and showing off what she bought, one of the records is Roy Ayers' Everybody Loves the Sunshine which she says is one of her favorite albums of all time, just wanna say that is an amazing pick, fucking incredible album, Hillary Clinton would never"

contrast

https://www.axios.com/2024/04/04/donald-trump-news-mar-a-lago

"Sinéad O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U" is a favorite. REM snuck in a couple of weeks ago. Elton John's another favorite."

Lol at “It’s a man’s world”

I love that her father's name is... Donald J.

to much oil.

i don't think i had even heard of using two different kinds of oil. the double fried thing goes well with the same dang oil. the woman is wasteful!

Contributing, no doubt, to higher oil prices. Just as we approach Peak Oil.

thanks for sharing that interview with Harris! i don't... listen to politicians very much. i figure i've heard everything they have to say, they're not talking to me. i legit just don't know anything about Harris, at all.

what i like about her, if i can be a historical wonk...

in america, when you have someone become president through being vice president, those are the presidents who are really interesting to me. for the most part. for me, the presidential nomination process selects for certain kinds of people. even if you don't start out as someone like that, it wears you down. there's this constant pressure to conform, conform, conform, so even if you're an idealist when you start out, most presidents... aren't like that. teddy roosevelt couldn't have gotten nominated. harry truman, lyndon johnson, both of those presidents were crooks, machine politicians. so was chester arthur, he came up through the spoils system, and what did he do when he became president? ended the spoils system. lyndon johnson, nobody was gonna vote for him because a texas democrat? god we can't run a racist! and i do think that lbj was, in fact, a racist - there's plenty of documentation of him going around saying racist stuff, doing racist stuff. but when he became president he pushed for civil rights legislation, in an election year, and then again after he got elected. jfk, i'm sure he wanted that stuff too, but he didn't push for it, didn't make it happen, the way lbj did.

and all of these people were deeply flawed people who did awful things, but they were also in some way people who challenged The Way Things Are Done the way someone who went through the usual nomination process of the time didn't. and this is particularly important to me because the biggest sense i get from the democratic curia is that they're really, really committed to The Way Things Are Done, the more they are to any principle or policy. that you get nominated not because the voters support you or because you have any particular strengths as a candidate, but because it's Your Turn. It was Al Gore's Turn. It was Hillary Clinton's Turn, Joe Biden's Turn. harris is not a candidate who was... i mean, if it ever did get to be Her Turn, it'd be 20 years from now when the democrats ran out of anybody older than her to run. like seriously selecting candidates on the basis of seniority is... bad. it's just bad.

so it was interesting reading what she had to say and what she didn't have to say. the thing that struck me was talking about being awake at 3 am, which is something... i relate to that a lot. and what awes me is just... that she can function. i guess that's how it is with politics. you have to function on a really high level without sleep. i read somewhere that warren g. harding slept for 12 hours a day while he was president. god. i can't imagine. and when he wasn't doing that, he was fucking his mistress! you have this job where you just have to be able to function on a very high level without sleeping. fucking terrible idea, fucking terrible way of running a government, but i'm in awe of harris being able to, like, talk coherently without making "gaffes".

what also impressed me is her talking... i stay away from people talking about school violence because i just. can't. i gotta kinda... is there a word for dissociating about what happens to others, about vicarious trauma? vicarious trauma hits me hard. i mean she's got the heartfelt personal anecdotes, yeah that's nice, jk rowling has heartfelt personal anecdotes. if it's there as a pretext for an infodump, for her to tell her own story, which i don't know, which probably a lot of people don't know, cool. if it's being used as an argument for policy, not so much. which is what rowling does. so when harris does that, i'm skeptical of that. it's persuasive obviously but you can justify some real bullshit with that.

analogies in general, though... they're great opportunities for what they used to call "spin". like, she portrays whatever pretext the israelis used for genocide in a lot more graphic and visceral terms than the passive-voice stuff she uses for the palestinian genocide.

she compares the israelis, actually, to burning man attendees, which is kinda funny to me. like some of my friends are burning man folks but overall burning man attendees aren't people i have the most empathy for. i think it's a good analogy because i think a lot of them probably would do a genocide. maybe that's an unfair judgement. anyway she sounds like a political hack when she says that stuff.

the main thing, though, is that presidents who don't go through the traditional route... what's interesting isn't so much what they _say_, but when they get power, what they _do_ with that power. and harris _doesn't_ have that power. i'm voting for her because i'm very interested to see what she does with that power. very interested. maybe a lot of that is terrible. i just feel like... i gotta know. good, bad, i gotta know what this lady would do as president.

I feel the same way. I'm interested to see what a Harris presidency would look like. Maybe it'll be very similar to four more years of Biden. But it's at least something new. I think back to the first debate in 2020 and the visual of these two old men, both of whom had been public figures since the 80's, just shouting at each other, and now it's like okay America, pick one. That was depressing enough, but here we are 4 years later and it's much worse versions of the SAME two old men - one is openly fascist and a convicted felon, the other is almost completely incomprehensible. It sucks! Harris isn't exactly a spring chicken but she's easy to look at and she speaks really well, and I think the fact that it's actually possible that we are going to have our first woman president (and a minority, no less!) really does at least *feel* like something new. She seems to be pushing the "are we going forwards or backwards?" thing a lot which is not an argument Biden could make. She has a bit of swagger to her. She's definitely a little weird, but not in the JD Vance way. Because it seems to come from a place of excitement and passion. Hillary didn't have that.

Harris isn't exactly a spring chicken but she's easy to look at and she speaks really well, and I think the fact that it's actually possible that we are going to have our first woman president (and a minority, no less!) really does at least *feel* like something new.

― frogbs, Wednesday, July 24, 2024

i mean i'm 48 years old, it's not like i'm all "don't trust anyone over 30" lol. she just doesn't look _dead_? she is able to convincingly give the appearance of a living human being? and that's a refreshing change after the last eight years.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/kamala-harris-pragmatic-progressive-different-biden-many-ways-n1236475

greatest hits!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHd_UlebyoM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK_HmEFxCpI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBR95rbQR7c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpbdgVt_w1M

I think Ive answersd the question
NO YOUVE NOT

It would be nice to see her grill Trump in a debate like a soggy orange charred yam

Lawyers are scary.
If she can assume the same facial expression of stern impatience coupled with complete despair, I also want to see this.
Although Trump is a different kind of beast, there's no intellect there to outsmart, but he can still be made to look on the defensive.

Can he though?

That is, can he be made to look defensive? We're not his audience. Harris is not his audience. Why would he be concerned about what she or we think of him? She has no power over him (yet).

He's made it clear he's only playing to the chuds. As long as he gets their adulation that's all he needs.

He's made it clear he's only playing to the chuds. As long as he gets their adulation that's all he needs.

That's not nearly enough to win a national election. Unless you're suggesting he doesn't care whether he wins or not.

If he's trying to broaden his appeal beyond the base, he's going about it in a very strange way. Perhaps it'll work out for him anyway, so much else has.

Trump's 2024 strategy is exactly the same as his 2020 strategy. Up until Biden's withdrawal it was working pretty well because it depended on enlarging the 'enthusiasm gap' between his base and Biden's and that gap was big enough for him to win. Now that Harris is his opponent he's got no different answer. His brain trust is hoping that the burst of enthusiasm for Harris will wither away as the 'honeymoon bounce' wears off and the attack machine can get revved up. That's their whole strategy. That, plus challenging the election in court again.

All they lack to make it work are effective lines of attack against Harris and a way to get off the defensive about Vance. They have about 100 days to discover that formula. It ain't working, yet, but they'll keep looking.

maybe someone will shoot at him again

maybe someone will shoot at him again

If he thought he could arrange this he totally would, but they killed the first guy, and everyone knows Trump doesn't pay contractors, so...

he lost the popular, he lost the electoral, and nothing has changed except his opponent - stunning that he's back on the ticket, but there you go

Call him weird, but also call him a loser: A weird loser

I think Trump is relying on overturning the results again: he’s got throughly Trumpified state legislatures, county commissions, local boards of elections, all the election apparatus that usually goes unnoticed and we take for granted

Until January 6, Congress “certifying” the election was a routine thing for 120 years or so.

I think Trump is relying on overturning the results again:

100% he is. he has repeatedly let everyone know that he will not accept the results of a loss, and he said the same thing in 2016 before he was surprised by winning

The thing that makes me think Harris might win is the fact people are saying Harris and not Kamala anymore

Or more accurately, saying Harris more and Kamala less

Yes, I think that's actually important! President Harris — sounds ... presidential! "Kamala" is more like a one-name pop icon. I think there's some value in it, it personalizes her, I understand why people are chanting "Kamala! Kamala!" at rallies instead of "Harris! Harris!" But for anyone in any serious capacity to call her Kamala sounds belittling. (I've been mostly saying Harris myself, though there are times in talking about her as a cultural figure where "Kamala" as a brand makes sense.)

I think sometimes first names settle and sometimes second names settle, and it can be for different reasons with different people - and neither is inherently good or bad. But I don't think I'd ever said Harris before, and now I've found myself only saying Harris. And I think its the change from one to the other thats the significant part, people almost never have their name usage changed like that organically

So if Harris does win, who presides over the certification of the electoral votes

Harris does.

Heh. That's gonna be...bizarre.

I mean...not really, in that as said above, this had become a mere formality for many years, but that you know how the shitheads across the aisle are going to expend energy to say OMG COMFLICT OF INTEREST (it won't matter but'll make for headlines I guess)

So if Harris does win, who presides over the certification of the electoral votes

It would be a stupid thing to make a stink about, but the remedy is simple enough. She could step aside in favor of a senate president pro tem. It's done frequently for other times the senate is in session. It would make zero difference to the outcome.

This kinda slaps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1Z1gXl9pFo

lol what

I'm starting to think I might vote for her after all