Presidential Politics: Choosing To Lose -- August 18, 2024

Locator: 48452HARRIS.

Did Benzinga change somewhere along the line? Maybe I simply missed it, but Benzinga seems to have really upped their game. I'm impressed except for all the ads. Seems like a clickbait site, and like the CNBC site, more and more stories require a subscription of some sort. Whatever.

From Benzinga on the presidential campaign trail:

"... will be a terrible president." Freudian? Should it have been "... would be a terrible president, and that's not gonna happen." But "... will be a terrible president"?

The New York Times has a great piece on Kamala's run for attorney general for California. It's a great article, but the author really, really missed the biggest takeaway from that article. See if you can spot it.

From the linked article: 

It was 2010 — the pinnacle of the Tea Party’s power — and Ms. Harris, running statewide for the first time, was struggling to shed the same San Francisco liberal label that Donald J. Trump is wielding as an epithet yet again.

Ms. Harris, then 45, was already seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party. “The female Barack Obama,” Gwen Ifill had memorably tagged her the year before. But plenty of rising stars are snuffed out early, and Ms. Harris was facing a formidable Republican foe in Steve Cooley, the popular and moderate district attorney of Los Angeles County.

Mr. Cooley’s reputation as an evenhanded, corruption-busting prosecutor had put him tied or narrowly ahead of Ms. Harris entering October — largely on the strength of his distinctive popularity for a Republican in Los Angeles. He had won election three times in what is the state’s most populous Democratic stronghold.

Ms. Harris was running out of both time and money when she arrived at their only debate on the first Monday of October. Then, about 45 minutes into the hourlong clash, Mr. Cooley gave an answer that was frank, fateful and foolish.

By the way, speaking of Kamala Harris. Has Kamala Harris really proposed any new initiatives that:

• Trump himself hasn't already proposed;
• that the Biden administration was already doing, or planning to do;
• that would really increase any federal spending like ObamaCare or the Covid stimulus acts;
• that would really negatively effect the average voter?

It's hard to pin the "socialist" tail on this donkey, more than any other democrat, except perhaps JFK and Bill Clinton.

On that continuum, Harris seems more to the right of Obama, but obviously left of JFK and Bill Clinton.

The border? Apparently it's pretty much under control right now (don't take that out of context; it's all relative).

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More Politics

The politics of this story interests me not. I was more curious to learn about Miriam Adelson's business interests than her politics. 

Adelson:

• is a (real) physician (unlike "Doctor Jill")
• born in Tel Avia, Mandatory Palestine, 1945, to parents who fled Poland before the Holocaust
• father owned several movie theaters in Haifa; a prominent member of a left-wing political party
• served mandatory army service as a medical officer
• medical degree, magna cum laude, Tel Aviv .... Medicine
• chief internist in an emergency room in Tel Avia
• Rockerfeller University in 1986; specialized in drug addiction
• instrumental in the methadone therapy movement for heroin addiction
• has publisher numerous scientific papers on topic of drug addition; 
• guest investigator at Rockefeller University
  
• is majority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, with her son-in-law -- a recent story; thank you, Mark Cuban;
• a voting member on the board of trustees: USC (my alma mater)
• do you think she will donate a few dollars to USC when she dies?
  
• is worth $28 billion;
• is the fifth-richest woman in America;
• richest Israeli in the world;
• 52nd richest person in the world (Bloomberg); 65th (Forbes)
• publisher
• current publisher of the newspaper Israel Hayom
• owns the Las Vegas Review-Journal
• Warren Buffett likes (or at least, used to like) newspapers, but I digress
• awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, say what?