Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez talks about health care as “the freedom to make your own choices,” by which she absolutely does not mean choices about whether to take Covid vaccines. Only some choices are allowed.
Pennsylvania Lt Gov. Austin Davis is here to tout the record of Josh Shapiro, who was conspicuously passed over to be VP – which killed Davis’s own chance to ascend immediately to the governorship.
It’s weird for Democrats to attack J.D. Vance for going to Yale. First of all, every Democratic presidential candidate between 1988 and 2016 went to Harvard and/or Yale. Second, I don’t think Democrats really want to talk about how Kamala Harris went to high school in Quebec.
“It is everyone’s responsibility to care for every child,” declared Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, describing herself as a longtime friend of Kamala Harris.
UCLA survey respondents in Los Angeles rate the city’s quality life as tied for the lowest in the nine years they’ve been conducting the survey. Forty-two percent of respondents said they felt favorable about Bass, 32 percent said they felt unfavorably, and 25 percent said they had never heard of Bass or had no opinion. Bass was sworn into office in December 2022.
You’re going to want to read Jeff’s account of “the world’s most sedately dispirited pro-Palestine rally” outside the Democratic convention site in Chicago. Getting there later in the day, I saw large piles of “STAND WITH PALESTINE” and “END U.S. AID TO ISRAEL” signs, bound and unused. I think you overestimated the turnout for the first day, fellas.
Service Employees International Union president April Verrett promises to bring about “a younger, darker, hipper, fresher, sneaker-wearing labor movement.”
When Democratic speakers say they’re fighting for the “freedom to join a union,” they mean allowing state lawmakers to compel workers in professions covered by a collective bargaining agreement to force you to join a local or garnish your wages.
Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio pushes Tim Walz line of attack that J.D. Vance left Ohio for Yale, which has struck me as odd. Do Democrats not want people to overcome poverty and succeed?
To judge just from the extent to which both the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions have competed with one another to prove that they’re the most pro-union while their opponents are mere pretenders, you would think that unionized workers will determine the outcome of this election. But only about 14 million Americans are either members of organized labor organizations or work in shops covered by a union contract, and they’re not well distributed geographically. The states with the highest unionization rates – Hawaii, New York, and Washington state – have the nation’s highest unionization rates. Imagine that.
The Republican convention largely shied away from retrospectives on the pandemic, save occasional references to the extent to which it allowed local Democratic officials to revise election law ahead of the 2020 vote. In a departure, the Democratic National Convention on Monday aired a video montage focused on the pandemic. It contrasted Trump’s leadership in that period with Kamala Harris’s, despite the paltry few relevant clips available to the video package’s producers. Nevertheless, it’s as close to a retrospective on the pandemic either party has attempted since the primaries, and there’s a reason why it aired just prior to primetime.