Ro Khanna, the progressive California Democratic respresentative, said the party is making a “tragic mistake” by not allowing a Palestinian person to speak on the main stage of the Democratic national convention.
As we reported earlier, the Uncommitted National Movement has continued its sit-in outside the convention after the anti-war group was denied its request for a Palestinian person to speak at the convention’s main stage. The group Muslim Women for Harris later announced that it was disbanding in response to the Harris-Walz campaign’s refusal of the group’s request.
Khanna, who was an early supporter of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, has met with Arab American and Muslim leaders disaffected by the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s war. He posted to X:
Abraham Aiyash, the majority leader in the Michigan House of Representatives, said leaders of the convention “cannot claim to want peace in Gaza but actively thwart the ability for Palestinians to speak their truth”.
The Guardian’s David Smith ran into Cornel West, the independent presidential candidate, outside the Democratic national convention.
What might he be doing here? Did West just come to take in the sights, or could it be a sign that he is following the lead of Robert F Kennedy Jr and will end his campaign, perhaps to Kamala Harris’s benefit?
Donald Trump has defended blocking a bipartisan immigration bill earlier this year even though it had the support of Republican leaders in Congress.
Following a speech in Arizona at the border with Mexico, where he accused the Biden-Harris administration of allowing millions of people to enter the US illegally, Trump was asked about his opposition to the legislation intended to curb immigration.
The bill had the support of Republican leaders in Congress, including Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. But after Trump made his opposition known, McConnell walked away from his own legislation and other Republicans also abandoned it.
Democrats have accused Trump of sabotaging the bill because he of wanting to keep immigration a live political issue. But Trump said he had opposed it for other reasons.
“It wasn’t bipartisan. They had a couple of people on the other side. It was weak. It was ineffective, and it would have allowed, as you know, millions and millions of people to pour through and largely unvetted. It was a horrible bill. It was a weak bill. And they don’t need a bill. All Biden had to do is look to the border and say: ‘Close the border.’ He didn’t need a bill.
“The bill was terrible. If it was good, I would have approved it.”
At the time, Mitt Romney, the Republican senator and former presidential candidate, criticised Trump as more interested in political moves than addressing immigration.
“I think the border is a very important issue for Donald Trump. And the fact that he would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is … really appalling,” he said.
I’m at the pro-Palestinian sit-in outside the United Center, where delegates and activists joined by representative Cori Bush are demanding that the Democratic leadership add a Palestinian American speaker to this night’s lineup to speak from the main stage.
Abbas Alawieh, a delegate from Michigan and leader of the uncommitted movement, said that negotiations with the Democratic party are ongoing and called on the leadership to make a decision by 6pm.
“When uncommitted came here, we didn’t just come for the four days, we came here to create a democratic pathway for the next four years,” said Lexis Zeidan, a co-chair of the uncommitted movement. “It’s not just about the speaker, it’s about Palestinian Americans deserving a voice in our society.”
“Our deadline we’ve set again is six o’clock for a response,” she said, adding that if the party did not meet the deadline, the group would announce updates about “what comes next for this movement”.
Alawieh and several others slept on the concrete last night outside the United Center as they increased pressure on the democratic leadership to address calls for a ceasefire and an arms embargo on Israel.
“As a member of the United States Congress, where else should I be when people in our community and our country are just saying we want a voice on that stage?” said Bush. ”It’s important because what we’re seeing on that stage are the priorities of the Democratic party as we go toward November. We understand that what is said there is being used to mobilize the country to show up in November.”
She asked for a speaker to give up a time slot to give a Palestinian American an opportunity to speak.
Chicago has been revelling in its status as host city of the Democratic national convention.
Among its pearls is the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, which opened in 1938 and is a treasure trove of autographs, letters, rare books, presidential memorabilia and reproductions of Lincoln and civil war photos.
It currently has an exhibition of artifacts from Chicago’s first political nominating convention in 1860 – the one that set Lincoln on course for the White House.
James Carville popped up for a tour of the bookshop on Thursday and posed for photos while holding a picture of William Sherman, a union army general during the civil war.
In a discussion with shop owner Daniel Weinberg and former White House official Sidney Blumenthal, the veteran Democratic strategist observed: “If you listen to Fox, Chicago is this giant hellhole: homeless people, streets, they’re shooting everybody. It’s one of nicest goddamn, places I’ve ever been.
“My only problem with Chicago as a convention site is that the United Centre is too far away. I don’t know there’s much you can do about it. At some point, Chicago should build a downtown arena like that but I think it’s just a marvellous city. You can get in and out of it.”
Weinberg noted Mark Twain’s saying that history rhymes. Carville, who led Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign, replied: “I think it more than rhymes. There’s a lot to be learned from European history – you’re not supposed to say that – but just the power alliances that live with us today.
“Internal conflicts: the movies that we’re seeing, the books that are being written, January 6 – I’m sorry, that’s a little more than rhyming. Forty percent of the people in 10 different states want to secede. History, I can’t say it repeats itself but I think it repeats itself more than it rhymes.”
Blumenthal, a Guardian columnist currently working on the fourth volume of a monumental Lincoln biography, rejoined: “What I’ve been saying is the deeper I get into the past, the closer I get to the present.”
Donald Trump appears to have finally acknowledged that he lost the 2020 election during a speech on the border with Mexico.
Trump was looking at a graph of immigration numbers toward the end of his presidency when he said: “This was a last week in office for me because of a horrible, horrible election where I got many millions more votes than I got the first time, but didn’t quite make it, just a little bit short.”
Trump did not expand on the statement, which came in the middle of a wandering speech accusing Kamala Harris of permitting millions of undocumented immigrants into the US.
Donald Trump has renewed his attacks on immigrants during a visit to the US border with Mexico by again falsely claiming that they are responsible for a disproportionate share of crime.
Speaking next to the border fence in Cochise county, Arizona, the former president alleged that countries in Latin America, Africa and Europe are emptying their prisons of criminals and sending them across the US border.
“Hardened criminals are pouring into our country. And then they always say the illegal immigrants don’t commit crimes like people that live here. It’s so wrong. They don’t report them, but it’s so wrong. They make our criminals look like babies,” he said.
“These are the roughest people, and they’re the roughest people from all over the world. Their jails are being emptied from all over the world.”
Trump then sought to pin the alleged flood of criminals into the US on to Harris because Biden appointed her to investigate the causes of rising migration from Central America.
“Since Comrade Harris took over the border, there has been a 43% nationwide increase in violent crime and a 60% increase in rape,” he said.
There is no evidence to back up these numbers but Trump claimed that is because the FBI is rigging the crime figures.
It’s sound check time inside the Democratic national convention hall, and the handful of delegates and journalists in attendance are getting to see musician Pink run through her set.
On that note, rumor has it there’ll be a surprise celebrity guest at some point this evening, but we can only speculate as to who that might be.
Donald Trump has been speaking from the US-Mexico border near Sierra Vista, Arizona, where he criticized Kamala Harris’s record on immigration and border security and called her “the worst vice-president”.
Kamala Harris joined the popular social media show Track Star, hosted by Jack Coyne.
In almost every episode of Track Star, guests listen to a snippet of a song, name the artist, and win money ($5), going double or nothing with each round.
On the episode published on Thursday, Harris correctly guessed songs by Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis and Too Short.
She said one song everyone should listen to is Everybody Loves the Sunshine by Roy Ayers. “I grew up with all that music,” she said.
Members of the Uncommitted National Movement, which won 30 delegates to the Democratic national convention, are calling for a Palestinian person to speak on the main stage of the convention.
The Harris-Walz campaign notably invited the family of Israeli hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin to speak on Wednesday, which the movement supported.
As we reported earlier, one of the potential speakers offered is Ruwa Romman, a Georgia state representative who is Palestinian.
Romman shared a copy of the speech she wanted to give with Mother Jones, adding that “if an elected official in a swing state who is Palestinian cannot make it on that stage, nobody else can.” Here’s an excerpt of her speech:
Let’s commit to each other, to electing Vice President [Kamala] Harris and defeating Donald Trump, who uses my identity as a Palestinian as a slur. Let’s fight for the policies long overdue – from restoring access to abortions to ensuring a living wage, to demanding an end to reckless war and a ceasefire in Gaza. To those who doubt us, to the cynics and the naysayers, I say, yes, we can – yes, we can be a Democratic party that prioritizes funding our schools and hospitals, not for endless wars. That fights for an America that belongs to all of us – Black, brown and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like my grandfather taught me, together.
Ro Khanna, the progressive California Democratic respresentative, said the party is making a “tragic mistake” by not allowing a Palestinian person to speak on the main stage of the Democratic national convention.
As we reported earlier, the Uncommitted National Movement has continued its sit-in outside the convention after the anti-war group was denied its request for a Palestinian person to speak at the convention’s main stage. The group Muslim Women for Harris later announced that it was disbanding in response to the Harris-Walz campaign’s refusal of the group’s request.
Khanna, who was an early supporter of a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, has met with Arab American and Muslim leaders disaffected by the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s war. He posted to X:
Abraham Aiyash, the majority leader in the Michigan House of Representatives, said leaders of the convention “cannot claim to want peace in Gaza but actively thwart the ability for Palestinians to speak their truth”.
Patrick Gaspard, a former White House official and influential thinktank leader, urged local businesses in states such as Georgia to prepare themselves, saying:
This is not just a Democrat versus Maga Republican thing. It is a profound American question. We have not seen anything like this before in our lives and so you can’t be waiting for that.
On a positive note, he added:
I will say I’m excited to see that Marc Elias, who is just a badass election lawyer that some of us worked with for a long time, is now officially sitting next to Bob Bauer [Joe Biden’s personal lawyer] inside the campaign and not outside of the campaign.
Patrick Gaspard, who served in various positions in Barack Obama’s administration, noted that the Republican state legislature in Georgia just enacted a provision that gives “astonishing” levels of discretion to state officials to question the outcome of a vote count to delay certification.
He warned of similar moves afoot in Nevada and North Carolina and also criticised Kevin Roberts, leader of the rightwing Heritage Foundation, for recent comments the country is in the midst of a “second American revolution” that will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”.
Gaspard, president and chief executive of the Center for American Progress in Washington, said:
That kind of rhetoric, the instrumentisation of those local elected offices and the stoking of these fires on social media – and Donald Trump himself will manipulate all of this – is going to lead to civil unrest and civil confrontation in a close contest that Kamala Harris is declared the winner in. I don’t think anybody is ready for that.
Patrick Gaspard, a former White House official and influential thinktank leader, has warned that America faces “multiple January 6-like incidents” if Kamala Harris ekes out a narrow electoral college victory in swing states.
“Following this election, which we will win in very close margins in those states, I’m 100% confident that Donald Trump and his cabal will say of course one, that the election was stolen and two, that people need to take back their country,” Gaspard told reporters at an event hosted by Bloomberg in Chicago.
They’re going to support mobilisations in the streets that I think will lead us to have not just a January 6-type incident in the Capitol, but that could potentially lead to multiple January 6-like incidents in state capitols around the country – in Michigan, in Pennsylvania, in Wisconsin, in Nevada, in Arizona, in North Carolina.
I just spoke with James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, and the last Arab American to speak from the main stage of the Democratic convention, in 1988.
He called the DNC’s decision to deny a Palestinian American speaker an “an unforced error, a kind of a bonehead move that is going to cost them votes and didn’t need to”.
Zogby said some of the potential speakers offered to the DNC included a Georgia state representative who is Palestinian, Ruwa Romman, and a Democratic organizer who has known Harris for years and has lost dozens of family members in Gaza, Hala Hijazi. He said:
It was a no brainer, just a no brainer, and they couldn’t agree to that, and I don’t know why, and I don’t think there was any logic involved.
This is what’s called a real stupid, boneheaded mistake, to end up literally dumping on your own story that ought to be about the convention and Kamala Harris and hope and joy and all that. And instead, we’re talking about a dumb mistake made by consultants to exclude Palestinian voices.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
