W. Niederhut

Well said, Denny. Harris seems very sincere, (and I usually have fairly good radar for fraudsters.) She's a remarkable woman-- highly intelligent, ethical, and articulate-- from a remarkable family. I spent some time today reading the Wikipedia chapters about both of her parents. Her mother was a cancer researcher from Madras, who came to UC Berkely from India for her graduate degree. Her maternal grandparents spent their retirement savings to send Shyamala to Berkeley. Her father is a retired Emeritus Professor of Economics at Stanford, who grew up in Jamaica and, among other endeavors, has done pro publica consulting work for the Jamaican government. Both parents were focused on academic research that benefits humanity.

Gateway Pundit? C'mon, Karl. You need to start thinking critically about your flawed, right wing "news" sources. Notorious far-right blog The Gateway Pundit declares bankruptcy over 2020 election-related lawsuits | CNN Business

Extraordinary acceptance speech by Kamala Harris tonight!! A grand slam!! She not only lived up to the high expectations raised all week, she exceeded them!

Covering Stevie Wonder songs is a fool's errand, but the Red Hot Chili Peppers did a decent heavy metal rendition of Higher Ground back in the day, thanks mainly to Flea's phenomenal bass lines. Michael McDonald has also done some decent Stevie Wonder covers. Who else would even try?

Denny, I was also impressed by the brief speech of Maryland Governor Wes Moore last night. This young man is an Afghanistan combat veteran (like Buttigieg) and a Rhodes Scholar with an M.A. from Oxford! First black Governor in the history of Maryland, a former slave state.

Let me guess. Will Trump put RFK, Jr. in charge of a pandemic response team? 🙄

Matt, IMO, Michelle Obama had the best comment of the Convention about this, when she said, "The job Donald Trump is seeking in 2024 could turn out to be one of those 'black jobs.'" 😆

Not to mention Stevie Wonder singing Higher Ground... 😎

Thanks, Bill. In our younger years, my wife and I made several trips to Europe, because my wife's sister used to work for American Airlines, (out of DFW) and we got free airline tickets every year. But she quit working as an AA stewardess after 9/11, and I haven't flown to Europe for almost 20 years now. My last trek over there was a Venetian cruise to Dubrovnik, Kotor, and Greece in (?) 2005. There are a number of places in Europe that I want to re-visit before I kick the bucket.

Good post, Bill. Nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment is strong stuff anywhere. Incidentally, my wife and I spent two weeks in Paris in (?) 1989, and the U.S. dollar was so weak at the time that we dined on a lot of colonial Algerian tabouli and Vietnamese fare in the Latin Quarter. The authentic French restaurants were very pricey at the time, which was a shame because French cuisine is my favorite.

Here's an educational Education Forum reference for you, Karl. You should spend less time focusing on right wing disinformation and punditry and more time reading scholarly books and articles. Biden 14th in scholars' presidential rankings, Trump last (ny1.com)

We may never get the truth about Trump and the Kremlin, but I have long believed that Putin "has Trump by the short hairs," as John LeCarre said after Helsinki.

Outstanding speech by Jeffries! A+

I dunno, Matt. My brother is a Trumpster, and he's not a bad guy. IMO, he has been brainwashed by Fox News. Not sure where our European pals on the forum are getting their fake "news," but I suspect it's either plutocratic nonsense, (Rupert Murdoch, Telegraph, Daily Mail) Kremlin propaganda, or both.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis is supposed to talk about the Heritage/Trump Project 2025 tonight. Hallelujah! The Democrats are focusing on the positive, but they should talk more about Project 2025 and January 6th. Perhaps Bennie Thompson will bring up the subject of Trump's historic J6 crimes tonight.

Kirk, I saw the Isley Brothers in concert at a small club in Denver in about (?) 1974. At that phase of their existence, two of the younger Isley brothers and a brother-in-law had joined the group. I remember a few of the brothers coming on stage barefoot. It was a good show.

Doug, I posted the full text of this Guardian article earlier today on the Political Discussion board. Interesting that H.R. McMaster waited until August 27, 2024 to finally publish his memoir. He's, obviously, one of the many former Trump White House staffers (> 90%) who want Americans to know that Trump is unfit for the Presidency. What amazes me is that so many Americans (and Europeans) still haven't figured that out.

Well said, Cliff. The Democrats, including FDR, John and Ted Kennedy, and Obama, have also initiated major anti-poverty measures at home and abroad during the past century-- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, Food Stamps, the Peace Corps, and foreign aid to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Republicans have opposed most of these anti-poverty policies, and Trump Republicans have endeavored to cut their funding.

Yes, Cliff, unfortunately, our Hibernian friend doesn't know anything about Steve Kerr. Sports fans know him as a championship coach and former teammate of the GOAT, Michael Jordan, but I admire him most for his commentaries denouncing Donald Trump and Mike Pence for their racist attacks on the Black Lives Matter civil rights protesters. At the time, Trump had inspired a lot of white guys in America to threaten NFL boycotts, and Kerr went out on a limb to take the bull by the horns. So did Greg Popovich. Profiles in courage.

Vladimir Putin manipulated Donald Trump’s ‘ego and insecurities’, book says Former US national security adviser HR McMaster claims Russian president had a hold over Trump in new memoir August 21, 2024 Vladimir Putin exploited Donald Trump’s “ego and insecurities” to exert an almost mesmeric hold over the former US president, who refused to entertain any negative evaluation of the autocratic Russian leader from his own staff, and ultimately fired his national security adviser, HR McMaster, over it. The bold assessment of Trump’s fealty to Putin comes in McMaster’s book At War With Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House, published by HarperCollins and arriving on 27 August. The Guardian obtained a copy. “After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump,” McMaster recalls saying in the memoir covering the turbulent 457 days the now retired general served as national security adviser from February 2017 until he was effectively fired by tweet in April 2018. The comment, to McMaster’s wife, Katie, came in the aftermath of the poisoning in the UK by Putin’s agents of Sergei Skripal, a Russian former intelligence officer, and his daughter, in March 2018. While other western leaders were beginning to formulate a strong response to the assassination attempt, McMaster says, Trump sat in the White House fawning over a New York Post article with the headline: “Putin heaps praise on Trump, pans US politics”. Trump, according to the book, wrote an appreciative note on the article with a black Sharpie and asked McMaster “to get the clipping to Putin”. “I was certain that Putin would use Trump’s annotated clipping to embarrass him and provide cover for the attack,” McMaster writes. He said he handed the note to the White House office of the staff secretary, which handles Oval Office communications. “Later, as evidence mounted that the Kremlin, and very likely Putin himself had ordered the nerve agent attack on Skripal, I told them not to send it.” In reality, McMaster says, Putin’s apparent simpering over Trump was a calculated effort by the Russian leader to exploit the president and drive a wedge between him and hawkish advisers in Washington DC such as McMaster urging the US to take a harder line with the Kremlin. “Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery,” McMaster writes. “Putin had described Trump as ‘a very outstanding person, talented, without any doubt’, and Trump had revealed his vulnerability to this approach, his affinity for strongmen, and his belief that he alone could forge a good relationship with Putin. “Like his predecessors George W Bush and Barack Obama, Trump was overconfident in his ability to improve relations with the dictator in the Kremlin. The fact that most foreign policy experts in Washington advocated for a tough approach to the Kremlin seemed only to drive the president to the opposite approach.” McMaster describes how Trump became obsessed by the Mueller report into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to the point that “discussions of Putin and Russia were difficult to have”. He says Trump “connected all topics involving Russia” to the report, and allegations by Democrats and other opponents that his campaign, and Trump personally, had colluded with “Russia’s disinformation campaign” to swing the election. Although special counsel Mueller found no evidence of a criminal conspiracy, he found multiple incidents in which the Trump campaign tried to obscure its contact with Russian operatives, and that Trump himself tried to interfere with or block the inquiry. When McMaster observed at a security conference in February 2018 in Munich that Mueller had indicted more than a dozen Russian agents for election interference, Trump tweeted a snarky response that the general had “failed” to point out that the election result had not been changed or affected by the Russian efforts. It was one of a number of broadsides from Trump that signified an increasingly fractured relationship with McMaster, almost all over Russia, that resulted in his ouster barely a month later. “On Putin and Russia, I had been swimming upstream with the president from the beginning,” writes McMaster, whose successor as national security adviser, John Bolton, also ended up falling out with the president and went on to become one of numerous former administration officials to condemn Trump’s re-election effort. McMaster recalls another episode in which he was castigated by Trump, at a July 2017 summit in Hamburg, Germany, which became famous for what the Guardian described at the time as a “budding bromance” between the US and Russian leaders as they spent hours locked in private conversation. “My basic message during the final prep meeting at the Hamburg Messe convention center was ‘do not be a chump’,” McMaster writes, noting that he told the president what Putin sought, including the US to abandon Ukraine, and withdraw US forces from Syria and Afghanistan, which Trump later ordered. “I told Trump how Putin had duped Bush and Obama. ‘Mr President, he is the best liar in the world.’ I suggested that Putin was confident he could ‘play’ Trump and get what he wanted, sanctions relief and the US out of Syria and Afghanistan on the cheap, by manipulating Trump with ambiguous promises of a ‘better relationship’. He would offer cooperation on counterterrorism, cybersecurity and arms control. “I could tell that Trump was getting impatient with my ‘negative vibe’. I said what I needed to say. If he was going to be contrary, I hoped he would be contrary to the Russian dictator, not to me.” Despite the strained relationship with Trump chronicled in his book, and criticisms of the former president therein, McMaster never joined the ranks of other former administration officials eager to castigate him once he left office. McMaster insists he remained apolitical during his service, looking out only for the interests of the US, and wrote the book to “get past the hyper-partisanship and explain what really happened”. Vladimir Putin manipulated Donald Trump’s ‘ego and insecurities’, book says | Politics books | The Guardian

Geez... thank goodness we have such keen, reality-based insights about American history and contemporary politics from our three colleagues in Austria, Ireland, and England. I wonder if Kinaski, Cotter, and Rigby realize that American history scholars have accurately ranked our serial felon, Donald Trump, as the worst President in American history. Do they know anything about the Trump/Heritage Foundation Project 2025? About Trump's offer to sabotage clean energy and climate change mitigation for Big Oil? About his pledge to cut more taxes for billionaires in exchange for 2024 campaign cash? About his role in organizing slates of False Electors, and inciting a violent mob attack on the U.S. Congress? Meanwhile, Trump's former National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, is currently trying to warn Americans about Trump's subservience to Vladimir Putin.

Good point, Kirk. They should have featured Bill Clinton as an earlier opening act for the Obamas. Trotting Bill out after those show-stopping speeches by Michelle and Barack Obama is like having James Brown open for the Rolling Stones in the TAMI Show. Tough act to follow. And, speaking of Bill and the 1990s, did you notice that Steve Kerr advised the young people in the audience to Google "Michael Jordan" to learn about Kerr's glory days with Da Bulls?

Pat, Thanks for answering my question. You have come up with quite an odd paradigm for the Dealey Plaza JFK assassination, which, apparently, fails to account for the retrograde motion of JFK's head during the fatal head shot, and also fails to account for Dr. Chesser's bullet fragment trail characteristic of a right frontal entry wound. But it's a free country, in which we respect freedom of speech, religion, thought, and theoretical musing.

Wow. Magnificent back-to-back speeches by Michelle and Barack Obama in Chicago tonight. What remarkable human beings!