Kamala Harris

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Animal Crossing: Biden campaign offers virtual yard signs in Nintendo game

      by

      Lorilei Storm, an American who has lived in Ireland for the last decade, has signs supporting Joe Biden all over her front yard – not in front of her Dublin flat, however, but the one surrounding her home in the wildly popular Nintendo game Animal Crossing.“Campaign signs aren’t as much of a thing in the UK, so I was really excited to find them in the game – I put up as many as I could,” Storm said.Joe Biden’s presidential campaign has introduced four different official yard signs in Animal Crossing, all of which users can download by scanning QR codes through the Nintendo Switch online app. Animal Crossing has been used for everything from weddings to talk shows and virtual dates as it gained popularity amid global lockdowns due to Covid-19. The addition of campaign material marks a new frontier for the game, and for America’s presidential race.The banners are the latest attempt by the Biden campaign to make virtual inroads with voters at a time when many traditional campaign events are considered unsafe due to Covid-19.While Biden has relied heavily on digital outreach this year, Donald Trump continues to hold in-person rallies, insisting doing so is “very safe” and mocking his opponents for “hiding indoors”. For that same reason, Trump will not be using Animal Crossing to get out the vote, said Samantha Zager, a spokeswoman for his campaign. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris assails Donald Trump's 'reckless disregard' for American people

      by

      Kamala Harris launched a withering attack on Donald Trump’s leadership hours before he will accept his party’s re-nomination on Thursday, accusing the president of demonstrating a “reckless disregard” for the American people in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.Speaking from an auditorium at George Washington University, Harris, a California senator who last week became the first woman of color to accept the vice-presidential nomination of a major party, unfurled a wide-ranging offensive against Trump to address what she said was “a reality completely absent from this week’s Republican national convention”.“The Republican convention is designed for one purpose: to soothe Donald Trump’s ego, to make him feel good,” Harris said. “But here’s the thing: he’s the president of the United States, and it’s not supposed to be about him. It’s supposed to be about the health and the safety and the wellbeing of the American people.”“On that measure,” she continued, “Donald Trump has failed.”Harris , a former prosecutor, methodically detailed Trump’s response to the pandemic from his early praise of the Chinese government to his focus on the stock market.“He got it wrong from the beginning and then he got it wrong again and again and the consequences have been catastrophic,” she said.During their four-day convention, Republicans have made few references to the pandemic, even as the death toll rises to 180,000. Instead, they sought to portray the president as a superhero figure, whose strong leadership will “make America great again, again” as Vice-President Mike Pence vowed.Harris, who marched alongside Black Lives Matter protesters earlier this year, also opened her remarks on Thursday by addressing the shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, by a white officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in an incident captured on camera. Attorneys say Blake is paralyzed and fighting for his life.“The shots fired at Mr Blake pierced the soul of our nation,” she said. “It’s sickening to watch. It’s all too familiar. And it must end.”Harris invoked Blake’s name, repeating the circumstances of his shooting for emphasis – “shot seven times, in the back”. She also spoke the names of other Black Americans killed this summer, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.While condemning violence that has transpired in Kenosha, Harris said Black Americans were “rightfully angry” and praised the Blake family, who she spoke with on Wednesday, for appealing for peace even as they seek justice.“It’s no wonder people are taking to the streets, and I support them,” she said, adding: “Make no mistake we will not let these vigilantes and extremists derail the path to justice.”The Wisconsin governor, Tony Evers, increased the number of national guard troops in Kenosha after a white 17-year-old was charged on Wednesday with killing two protesters and injuring a third.Identifying the mounting crises – from the raging wildfires in California and the hurricane ripping across Louisiana, to the spate of police killings of Black Americans and a rising death toll from the coronavirus – Harris closed her speech by asking Americans to judge Trump on his performance.“We all know, he’s not changing. The president he has been is the president he will be,” she said. “But we have a chance to right these wrongs, and put America on a better path.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      With a word of Tamil, Kamala Harris boosts her fanbase in India

      by

      As a child wandering between the legs of the aunts, uncles and family friends who filled her grandparents’ apartment in Chennai, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, a young Kamala Harris grew used to being addressed in Tamil.It was the main language spoken by her grandmother, who had only fragmented English, and over the years of Harris’s childhood trips from California to Chennai – which back then was called Madras – to visit her mother’s side of the family, she slowly learned to understand, if not speak, the mother tongue of her Indian relatives.Standing at the Democratic convention podium last week accepting her historic nomination for US vice-president, Harris made a passing but significant nod to this aspect of her heritage. She said her mother had “raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage”, adding: “Family is my uncles, my aunts and my chithis.” More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Biden indicates he could run for second term if he beats Trump in November

      by

      Joe Biden, who will be the oldest US president ever inaugurated if he beats Donald Trump in November, has indicated he could run for a second term.Biden is 77 but he will be 78 on inauguration day in January. He is running against the current oldest president to take power, who was 70 in January 2017 and is now 74.Trump has faced questions about his own health and mental ability, but it hasn’t stopped him attacking his challenger on the same grounds.Asked about such attacks in an ABC interview scheduled for broadcast on Sunday night, Biden said: “Watch me. Mr President, watch me. Look at us both. Look at us both, what we say, what we do, what we control, what we know, what kind of shape we’re in.“I think it’s a legitimate question to ask anybody over 70 years old whether or not they’re fit and whether they’re ready. But I just, [the] only thing I can say to the American people, it’s a legitimate question to ask anybody. Watch me.”Biden has previously challenged Trump to a press-up competition and suggested he would have beaten him up in high school.ABC released clips of its interview with Biden and Kamala Harris, the 55-year-old California senator who is Biden’s running mate.Biden has said he sees himself as a transitional figure, leading many to predict he will serve only four years if elected. If he ran and won in 2024 he would be 82 on inauguration day. On handing over power, he would be 86.“We haven’t spent nearly enough time building the bench in the Democratic party,” Biden told ABC. “…So [what] I want to do is make sure when this is over, we have a new Senate, we won back statehouses, we’re in a position where we transition to a period of bringing people up to the visibility that they need to get to be able to lead nationally. And that’s about raising people up. And that’s what I’m about.”Asked if he was “leaving open the possibility you’ll serve eight years if elected”, Biden said: “Absolutely.”Also on ABC on Sunday, deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield told This Week Biden has not had the coronavirus and “has not been tested”. “Moving forward,” she said, “should he need to be tested, he would be.” She also said the campaign had “put in place incredibly strict protocols to ensure that everybody involved who is around Vice-President Biden, who’s around Senator Harris, is undergoing the appropriate testing”.In the joint interview, Biden was asked about how he would handle the pandemic in office.“I would shut it down,” he said, asked if he would close the country if necessary. “I would listen to the scientists.“I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus. That is the fundamental flaw of this administration’s thinking to begin with. In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus.”Trump responded on Twitter, writing: “Despite biggest ever job gains and a V-shaped recovery, Joe Biden said, ‘I would shut it down’, referring to our country. He has no clue!”In fact the US economy continues to struggle and this week the number of people applying for unemployment benefits, of down on the dizzying highs of the spring, climbed back over 1 million.In a separate, solo interview with ABC, Biden was asked about another subject central to the campaign, as protests over police brutality continue: “President Trump says that you want to defund the police. Do you?”“No I don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to defund police departments. I think they need more help, they need more assistance, but that, look, there are unethical senators, there are unethical presidents, there are unethical doctors, unethical lawyers, unethical prosecutors, there are unethical cops. They should be rooted out.”In the joint interview, ABC’s David Muir brought up Trump’s attacks on Harris, which seem in part inspired by her tough questioning of appointees including supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh during Senate proceedings.“President Trump has referred to you as ‘nasty’, ‘a sort of madwoman’, ‘a disaster’, ‘the meanest, most horrible, most disrespectful of anybody in the US Senate’. How do you define what you hear from the president?”Harris laughed, and said: “Listen, I think there is so much about what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth that is designed to distract the American people from what he is doing every day that is about neglect, negligence and harm to the American people.”“And incompetence,” Biden chipped in. “The idea that he would say something like that – no president, no president has ever said anything like that. No president has ever used those words.“And no president has said people coming out of fields with torches and spewing antisemitic bile and met by people who oppose them, and someone dies, and he says they’re good people on both sides. No president of the United States has ever said anything like that ever.”That was a reference to far-right protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, in which a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed. Biden said those events, and Trump’s response, helped inspire his third run for the White House. More