It’s a poor stunt, is the point. Not convincing for most, AFAIK. So if the point was to demonstrate safety, why didn’t he take a normal gulp?
Unless, of course, you believe he really just happened to have been coughing twice and just happened to have needed to only wet his lips and wasn’t trying to demonstrate anything at all…yes, it’s statistically possible. Just seemed very strange for a man widely renowned for his command of optics.
How does anyone parse this? A tweet of @Jeremy_Ellwood seen on Facebook the other day:
Instead of exploding in anger, my initial reaction, I posted “Kamala Harris FTW! I love her!” That got no reaction. The only other comment was “What don’t they like about her?” That also went unanswered.
All I see there is destructive glee from a so-called progressive at helping Trump to win and threatening to do it again. No logical relevance to Kamala Harris about the DNC “coronating” (that isn’t a real word, you know). Nothing about finding ways to help America become better. Just mindless destructiveness for its own sake. smh
What is there to parse? It pretty simply says progressives of his ilk will not accept Harris. What is the difficulty?
Yes, tha attacks from the kremlin begin.:mad: Isn’t he from NZ anyway?
I have made no secret of the fact I dont like some of her politics. But I even said that to balance out the “old white guy” as Prez i could see her as Veep, so I dont hate her. But she is low on my preferred choices.
There will always be idiots saying idiotic things. There will always be someone saying “you better not nominate X!”. All we can do is pick the candidate we think best represents our values and will have the best chance to win.
Who is Jeremy Elwood, and why should I care what he says?
Nobody asked you to care about anything.
Because it raises concern that the insidious destructive politics that attached to Bernie last time, secretly backed by Putin, is raising its ugly head again. Time to be forewarned.
Yes, this is a good point. We should keep this in mind for any poorly or anonymously sourced attacks on Democratic candidates.
What’s so irritating about @Jeremy_Ellwood is reusing the same tired attack line they used against Hillary 4 years ago, without even bothering to come up with anything relevant for today. The flat-out lazy idiocy of it all.
I wonder how much the Kremlin pays him?
I looked into who had posted that stupid tweet on FB and it was a Tulsi Gabbard enthusiast, whose cover picture is Gabbard campaigning side-by-side with Bernie. If Gabbard is a progressive, I’m Marie of Roumania. Idiocy upon idiocy!
Yes, she previously claimed she smoked pot once in college and it was a joint. DJ Envy asked her “What do you listen to? I know you have to go, but what does Kamala Harris listen to?”
Meaning, what do you currently listen to.
Then CTG asks immediately, “What was you listening to when you was high? What was on? What song was playing?”
She laughs and exclaims, “Oh my goodness.”
DJ Envy then asks, “Was it Snoop?”
Past tense, so he was piggybacking on CTG’s question.
Kamala Harris replies, “Definitely Snoop, Tupac for sure…”
Then DJ Envy asks “What do you listen to now? What’s your favorite hip-hop artist.”
Then she replies that she really likes Cardi B.
You’re right it’s not a big deal when it comes to all the problems in our country, and it’s a drop in the bucket compared all the lies Trump tells on a daily basis.
I took it as her attempt to appeal to pander to the youth crowd. Silly, but that’s it.
I did think it was wrong that The Washington Post and MSNCB felt the need to do damage control for her. WaPo has a video where they try to explain it away, and one of the hosts at MSNBC said that FOX was lying about the whole thing.
Harris actively fought to prevent trans prisoners from getting SRS in prison. She wass a prosecutor who actively led the fight against (voluntary) sexworkers. She has a wonderful quote about why we should keep or increase prison funding instead of education. As far as I can tell, she doesn’t even seem to see much wrong with our absurd sentencing lengths and incarceration volume. These are completely valid criticism and incredibly actively damaging viewpoints for a lot of people.
This is before you even hit the “far left” part of the equation where the likes of prison abolitionists and anarchist who proudly chant ACAB live.
This is not some bit of purity politics. It’s life or death for a lot of people. Can you not see why a lot of people, especially trans folk and sex workers (which often overlap) and those who care for them may be incredibly against voting for her?
Now, yes, I have to acknowledge that even in the sphere of things about her that are concerning not everything is bad, the proposed reduction of bail for criminal offenses, for instance, is good. But by and large with her background, not just as a prosecutor, but as someone who fought tooth and nail for specific policies, it’s hard for me to believe she’d even throw half the people I care about a bone, much less champion their rights.
I’ll still vote for her, absurdly begrudgingly, if she gets the nomination, she’s almost certainly better than Trump and our shit electoral system ensures third parties don’t work mathematically… but I’m extremely concerned she’s just going to worsen our absurd approach to crime, law enforcement, under an air of liberal friendliness and legitimacy (which isn’t anything new, to be fair. See: Bill Clinton’s entire approach to crime; See: Obama’s use of ICE).
I swear people are already closing the Democrat Criticism Window. Not every vehement criticism of a candidate is the Kremlin sowing discord. Yes, yes, we have intelligence that they plan to do that and have likely started already. But Harris, in particular, has an incredibly concerning record that only becomes more concerning the farther left you are. She does not appeal to the far left. She does not appeal to center-right Third Way Democrats who are leery about this whole “UHC” or “Green New Deal” thing, I’m confused about why anybody is pushing her so far, she seems like the candidate that appeals to the most narrow possible band of slightly-but-not-too-left Democrats who are vaguely sympathetic to social democracy.
There is a difference between the sorts of issues you raise and the link that Johanna calls attention to and the distortion of comments made to create silly gotchas out of bupkiss.
That said,
makes one wonder what “often” means.
To quote from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey Executive Summary -
It is in my mind a stretch to call someone who “ever” exchanged sex for income a “sex worker”, a further stretch to call even those “ever” or “in last year” 12 or 9% “often”, and even more of a stretch to imply that such means the converse, that a high fraction of all sex workers are trans.
From what I understand the explanation for the numbers of transpeople who have ever exchanged sex for money is desperation for money due to severe discrimination. As sex workers they are often subject to abuse and victimization.
Seems to me order of business is to fight against that discrimination, not to facilitate sex work as a viable option.
This seems to be the basis of the sex worker complaint against Harris. She
One consequence was that it made it harder for independent sex workers to do business via the net, “forcing” them to do business in riskier ways (finding other, legal, work is not an option I guess).
Personally I find the shut down of child sex trafficking a pretty big plus. And I cannot fault her for doing the job of making breaking the law harder to do. YMMV.
OTOH the fighting against SRS for prisoners who need it seems like a bigger hit on her.
This sort of discussion about issues is not suspicious for being Kremlin sowed and is in my mind reasonable to air out.
How do other candidates stack up on making it easier for sex workers to do business by internet sites? On the issue of SRS for prisoners and other items regarding trans-discrimination?
It does. 
However, in the intervening years, she may have come around and become more enlightened on the issue. Like Obama eventually did on marriage equality. Let’s push her to make a policy position of it now, then we’ll re-evaluate.
Here in Great Debates just about 10 years ago, Doper sentiment was heavily against SRS for trans prisoners. I had to argue against otherwise liberal Dopers saying, and I quote, “Not just no, but Oh Hell No.” Against Dopers citing a badly flawed and outdated, misleading survey claiming that SRS didn’t help gender dysphoria. If Dopers have so come around in the meantime to consider this opposition a “hit” against a Democratic candidate, then Harris can too. There’s been great and fairly rapid progress in just the last few years. Ten years ago, there were no healthcare insurance plans that covered SRS. Now they’re commonplace! Harris has to be aware of this and take it into consideration when she thinks it over now.
I hope I was not one of those “Not just no, but Oh Hell No.” Dopers, but I will say that I learned a bunch from Una’s threads and cites in particular and that my ignorance has been vastly reduced regarding these issues even over the past five years, let alone ten. Yes, growth should be allowed. Still it is sometimes hard to assess what is growth and what is disingenuous self-serving political positioning in an election season.
As to the Kremlin smears, they’re all revved up already:
A foreign disinformation campaign is targeting Democrats ahead of 2020, report says
The FOSTA-SESTA bill passed the House and Senate by overwhelming margins. Exactly 2 Senators voted against it. (And one of them was Rand Paul, of course.) Chances of finding any serious candidate for the presidency who wants to be known as the pro-sex worker candidate are probably not very good.
Harris made it a crusade in CA, however. But simply voting for it should not be a hindrance.