Good morning, everyone!
Yes, the first part of this Thursday pundit round-up is heavy on Kamala Harris stuff...but with a twist!
The Mercury News & East Bay Times Editorial Boards write about the selection of their United States Senator, Kamala Harris, to be Joe Biden’s 2020 running mate.
Her skills as a prosecutor will serve Biden well during the remainder of the campaign, especially in her debate with Vice President Mike Pence. And her relative youth, thoughtful approach to policy and background as a woman of color will provide Biden a solid sounding board if he is elected president.
If Biden turns to Harris as President Barack Obama relied on Biden for advice, it will broaden him as a candidate and as the nation’s leader. As for the ultimate vice-presidential qualification — especially because Biden, if elected, would be 78 when he took office — Harris has demonstrated that she is well-qualified to step in as commander in chief.
In most normal years, the selection of a vice-presidential running mate has not proven to significantly affect the top-of-the-ticket race. But Biden, while running with Obama in 2008, saw the damage of a bad pick when Sen. John McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
Moreover, this isn’t a normal year. Apart from the higher focus on Biden’s running mate because of his age, the Democratic candidate raised the stakes with his announcement that he would pick a woman and the anticipation that, in a time of increasing focus on racial inequity, his selection would be a person of color.
Yes, the U.S. news is filled with Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris to be his running mate but I was curious about to the overseas reaction to Senator Harris as Biden’s running mate: especially the Indian reaction.
Kunal Purohit (w/AFP news agency) writes for the South China Morning Post about Harris’ relatives still in India. Then he offers some analysis of what a Biden-Harris presidency could mean for American relations with India and China.
The VP nominee has often talked about her Indian family and has called her mother and her grandfather, PV Gopalan, two of the “most influential people in my life”. PV Gopalan was a freedom fighter who took part in India’s bid to overthrow British colonial rule.
Her mother’s family still lives in India.
“There is no question about how happy we are,” Harris’ maternal uncle, Balachandran Gopalan, an academic in the Indian capital of New Delhi, said on Wednesday.
“She is a very committed personality – committed to public service and most importantly committed to common human decency.”
Shyamala Gopalan would often bring her daughters to India and when she died in 2009, Harris returned “to immerse her ashes in the Bay of Bengal”, the uncle said.
Although Harris did not speak Tamil, the language of the southern state, “she can understand a little bit”, he said.
Balachandran Gopalan said the nomination of Kamala – whose name means “lotus” in Tamil, as well as in Sanskrit and Hindi – was a “big deal” for Indian-Americans.
Interesting editorial in the Hindustan Times.
The tale of the incredible Indian living the American dream continues with Kamala Harris’ selection as the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate. If Joe Biden wins the November elections, as the polls currently predict, Ms Harris, half-Indian, half-Jamaican, and all-American, will be a heartbeat away from being the world’s most powerful person. Her prospects are even better in the future: Mr Biden has repeatedly hinted he will be a single-term president making Ms Harris a shoo-in for the Democratic candidacy in 2024. Ms Harris represents the political pinnacle of the Indian-American community’s meteoric rise in the United States (US). Numbering barely 4.5 million and mostly first-generation, Indian-Americans have emerged as the US’ most highly educated and most wealthy ethnic group. However, what has been even more remarkable is the speed with which they have entered domestic politics. Winning elected office is the most difficult barrier of acceptance for an immigrant community to cross. Despite the relatively young provenance of the Indian-American community, it can already boast of two state governors, 10 national legislators, and, now, a vice-presidential candidate.
Mr Biden’s choice of Ms Harris fulfils his public promise to choose a female running mate. Since she is identified as a black American politician with the larger US public, he also paid off a debt to the community which saved his campaign. Through her identity, she is a symbol of racial, ethnic and gender equality at a moment when social justice movements have rocked the country. Among these, the fact that she is an Indian-American was arguably the least important element of her profile when it came to the reasons Mr Biden chose her. That should not be a concern. Being an Indian-American means you are from a community that is too small, too liberal and too well-off to be a political consideration. Nonetheless, it is striking that Latinos, a community that can claim to have been part of US history for over four centuries, have yet to have one of their number chosen to share a presidential ticket.
That’s a lot to unpack from an American perspective; many Indian Americans that I’ve known do (to the extent that they can) subscribe to the “model minority” thing, in my experience, and they take some pride in it.
I mean, she tried!
Chidanand Rajghatta writes for Times of India (From Lotus to Potus!) and even includes some views that Indians should not take too much pride in the accomplishments of Senator Harris.
WASHINGTON: Indians and Indian-Americans weighed in on Kamala Harris, with vigorous discussions breaking out on various forums on the extent of her “Indianness” and whether she would make the transition from “Lotus to Potus,” the name Kamala meaning lotus, and Potus the acronym for President of the United States.
The fact that Harris identifies herself primarily as black despite her Indian heritage from her mother’s side was a matter of disappointment to some Indians who felt there should be no reason for celebration for India.
"That day when a little girl from Oaktown became the first black woman to be a major-party vice-presidential nominee... So incredibly proud of you, sis!" her sister Maya Harris tweeted soon after Joe Biden announced his pick, lending weight to the black identity the sisters embrace.
Indian right wing analysts flagged this. "Dear Indian Media, I know this is hard but please avoid ‘Kamala Harris - Indian pride’ Template. She does not care for this appropriation/endorsement and you end up looking like fools," cautioned Sunanda Vashist, an Indian-American political commentator.
But other Indian-Americans who also balance American citizenship and Indian heritage celebrated one of theirs rising up the political sweepstakes.
In another story at the Times of India citing Kamala Harris many firsts, it was pointed out that:
Around 1.3 million Indian-Americans are expected to vote in this year's election, with nearly 200,000 in battleground states like Pennsylvania and 125,000 in Michigan, according to the research firm CRW Strategy.
I also read in another Indian online newspaper (Indian Express?) that over 300,000 Indian Americans live in Texas.
“A community that is too small?” Maybe...but in a few battleground states...those votes could be the difference between winning and losing.
I remember in 2016 when U.S. D.C. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan was on President Obama’s shortlist for a SCOTUS nomination. At that time, I was a close acquaintance with an Indian-American nearing the end of getting his Ph.D from a local university. Every time that I saw him, he would mention, with pride, that President Obama was about to nominate someone with his ethnic background to SCOTUS. (G. was also a first generation American born and raised in Mississippi...needless to say, he had something of a complicated relationship with his home state).
Mary Mitchell of the Chicago Sun-Times on the looting that took place on the Magnificent Mile in Chicago earlier this week.
...the type of pop-up vandalism that took place on Sunday has been going on in Chicago for a while.
In fact, police officers have been trying to deal with large crowds of young thieves targeting Mag Mile stores for at least two summers.
Sunday night’s rampage showed that groups of looters (with the help of social media) remain one step ahead of police.
I recognize that youth from poorer neighborhoods have been so marginalized; they have no respect for police or business owners in these wealthy areas.
But there’s no excuse for destroying property and robbing stores.
What happened Sunday night on the Mag Mile was not a protest. It was not a revolution. It was anarchy.
This brazen incident also exposes the divide that exists in the African-American community when it comes to criminality, and why calls to “defund the police” are falling on a lot of deaf ears.
I agree 100% with Ms. Mitchell and I know quite a few Black people that do. Statements from Black Lives Matter Chicago certainly didn’t help matters.
And I really agree with the point that if Richard Daley or Rahm Emanuel had been mayor, those knuckleheads would not have tried that sh*t; which was far more destructive than what’s happened the past two summers.
Sh*t gets me mad, to be honest...so let’s move on.
Renée Graham of the Boston Globe points out that: yes, The Damn Fool has a plan for that.
...As was the case in 2016, Putin is again putting his thumb on the scale in favor of his “useful idiot” in the White House. And there is no evidence that mail-in ballots cause “corruption all over the place.” Yet this is all part of Trump’s grand and destructive strategy, including crippling the United States Postal Service, to upend the presidential elections.
Trump, you see, does have a plan in 2020.
Ignoring COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, has been Trump’s scheme all along. It’s wrong to say he’s done nothing. If a house is in flames and no one moves to put it out, that is doing something — allowing it to burn to the ground.
And that’s where we are regarding the pandemic. It’s not just Trump’s incompetence that has allowed America, with about 5 percent of the world’s population, to amass 25 percent of its coronavirus cases. It’s also been his vindictive willfulness to let this fire consume lives and livelihoods mostly unchecked.
Trump isn’t only overlooking the virus because he believes focusing on it may hurt his reelection chances. From the beginning, he’s also accepted it as a malevolent gift, an election-year disruptor of the democracy he so despises. At every turn, Trump has used the coronavirus as a means to deter voting and scare voters because he knows every woeful day he stumbles through his presidency lessens his chances at a second term.
According to Erica Werner and Jeff Stein at the Washington Post, any hope for relief as died
In declaring the whole process over, Trump used a news conference to criticize Democrats’ proposals for funding election preparations and the Postal Service as part of a broader spending measure. Those were among multiple issues that divided the parties during two weeks of negotiations that initially collapsed Friday before a failed attempt to revive them Wednesday.
“The bill’s not going to happen because they don’t even want to talk about it, because we can’t give them the kind of ridiculous things that they want that have nothing to do with the China virus,” Trump said at the White House during an evening news briefing, using a term criticized as racially insensitive.
His comments came hours after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke for the first time since the talks fell apart last week. But their conversation did not break the impasse, instead leading to another round of finger-pointing.
The idea that Trump was supposed to be a great wheeler and dealer was just such a fantastic con and so many people fell for it.
Helen Branswell of STATnews with a reminder that: winter is coming.
Winter is coming. Winter means cold and flu season, which is all but sure to complicate the task of figuring out who is sick with Covid-19 and who is suffering from a less threatening respiratory tract infection. It also means that cherished outdoor freedoms that link us to pre-Covid life — pop-up restaurant patios, picnics in parks, trips to the beach — will soon be out of reach, at least in northern parts of the country.
Unless Americans use the dwindling weeks between now and the onset of “indoor weather” to tamp down transmission in the country, this winter could be Dickensianly bleak, public health experts warn.
“I think November, December, January, February are going to be tough months in this country without a vaccine,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
***
Human coronaviruses, the distant cold-causing cousins of the virus that causes Covid-19, circulate year-round. Now is typically the low season for transmission. But in this summer of America’s failed Covid-19 response, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is widespread across the country, and pandemic-weary Americans seem more interested in resuming pre-Covid lifestyles than in suppressing the virus to the point where schools can be reopened, and stay open, and restaurants, movie theaters, and gyms can function with some restrictions.
Michael Specter of the New Yorker on how Trump’s COVID-19 attacks on doctors and public health institutions affect every part of our public health system.
No single national leader would have been able to prevent the coronavirus pandemic. But Trump’s denialism and hostility toward public-health officials has greatly increased America’s share of suffering and death. On “Fox & Friends,” on Wednesday, he said that the virus is spreading in a “relatively small portion” of the country, and that children are virtually immune; both statements are false. And, as he has done many times before, he declared at a briefing that the pandemic would just “go away.”
Trump has had one consistent response to the pandemic: he attacks leading experts when they attempt to tell the truth. Last week, when Deborah Birx, the coördinator of the White House coronavirus task force, characterized the epidemic as “extraordinarily widespread,” Trump tweeted that she was “pathetic.” Earlier this year, when Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, was asked at a briefing to discuss his view on hydroxychloroquine, Trump prevented him from answering. The President’s refusal either to lead or to recognize the leadership of others has made it impossible to develop a national plan to combat this virus.
Without such a plan, the nation has been subjected to a giant game of viral roulette. With no coherent system of rapid tests, contact tracing is all but useless. Since we have neither a vaccine nor any general therapy, tests and tracing offer the only near-term hope of controlling the pandemic. States have largely been left to fend for themselves. Last week, seven governors, Republicans and Democrats, formed their own testing coalition.
Jennifer Steinhauer of New York Times that maybe Americans just wanted a little bit too much indoor dining and bar-hopping and...a return to normal.
In Louisiana, roughly a quarter of the state’s 2,360 cases since March that were outside of places like nursing homes and prisons have stemmed from bars and restaurants, according to state data. In Maryland, 12 percent of new cases last month were traced to restaurants, contact tracers there found, and in Colorado, 9 percent of outbreaks overall have been traced to bars and restaurants.
It is unclear what percentage of workers transmitted the virus among themselves, or to patrons or whether customers brought in the virus. But the clusters are worrisome to health officials because many restaurant and bar employees across the country are in their 20s and can carry the virus home and possibly seed household transmissions, which have soared in recent weeks through the Sun Belt and the West.
Since late June, scores of popular restaurants throughout the country, including in Nashville, Las Vegas, Atlanta and Milwaukee, had to close temporarily because of cases among employees. Texas and Florida also had to close bars this summer after a surge of new cases hobbled those states. In a recent week in San Diego, 15 of the 39 new cases in community settings stemmed from restaurants. And in Washington, D.C., cases have begun to sneak up since the city reopened indoor dining.
In New York City and many other places, indoor dining, which has proved far more dangerous than outdoor eating, remains banned. Epidemiologists roundly agree that indoor dining, especially in bars, is far more likely to spawn outbreaks than outdoor settings.
Finally, today, Dave Zirin of The Nation points out that since Republicans aren’t doing anything else, they’ve looked and looked and found a new toy: college football.
Forget for a moment the coaches, tutors, trainers, and everyone surrounding a college football team who could be at greater risk. There is also the obvious fact—and again it is utterly inexcusable that the president doesn’t acknowledge this—that we still don’t have a clear picture about the long-term effects Covid can have on those who survive it. Heart, lung, and kidney ailments, even attacks on the brain are all possibilities for college athletes that contract the disease.
These student-athletes are unpaid, disproportionately Black, with none of the union power of their NFL counterparts. But it’s not only a disregard for Black lives that drives the Republican push. It’s also a fear that the absence of the sport, especially in battleground states like Georgia, Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, will be a glaring reminder to the public of just how badly the GOP has bungled the US pandemic response.
If college football doesn’t happen, it will be because our federal leadership failed to prepare us for it. Countries that listened to the scientists and masked up have their sports. Led by Trump’s promises that it would all just disappear, we have not taken the precautions, and now we must bear the fruit.
Everyone have a good morning!
