New york times

Former president Barack Obama made his pitch on Thursday to black men on why they should vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, accusing them of having hang-ups about voting for a woman. Obama stopped off at a Harris campaign office in Pittsburgh ahead of a rally in the city and said he wanted to “speak some truths” to black men as recent polls show former Donald Trump doing comparatively well with the group.

Vice President Kamala Harris is set to unveil her policy platform this week after criticism that she has failed to say what she would actually do as president in the weeks since becoming the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee.The process does not appear to be going well. Harris said her platform will “be focused on the economy and what we need to do to bring down costs,” which is a bit puzzling as she is the number two executive in the Biden administration, which has repeatedly assured us that “Bidenomics” is working to heal the economy post-Covid. Harris will face this conundrum with all of the policies she puts forward; why hasn’t she done it in the past four years? Will she blame a divided Congress? President Joe Biden?

“Somebody in a position of authority needs to talk to her and make her stop,” complained a thirty-six-year-old man to a Fairfax County, Virginia, officer on the line, according to a recording reviewed by the New York Times. The alleged perp here? Martha-Ann Alito, wife of conservative Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito. Like Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia, Martha-Ann is now all over the news, with progressive activists ready to use her to discredit her husband’s rulings. Earlier this month, the Times reported the Alito household had flown an upside-down Old Glory flag at their Virginia home. The US flag code states that the flag ought not to be inverted “except as a signal of dire distress in instance of extreme danger to life or property.

A decade ago, when I first started contributing to the New York Times’s annual “52 Places to Go” list, the top user comments were about the destinations: Why was Calcutta chosen but not Chattanooga? This year, in a sign of the times, the most popular comments suggest that we should all just stay home to save the planet. The climate-obsessed among us are falling out of love with travel, particularly with the idea of exploring far-off places where your carbon footprint is greater. If their movement gains steam they won’t save the world, but they might well wreck the global economy and deprive themselves and others of much-needed perspectives and experiences that make the world a better place.

As former president Donald Trump seems to be cruising to the GOP nomination — a NewsNation poll has him ahead fifty points over his nearest rivals — his critics in the media and on the left are trotting out a familiar attack. Over the past two weeks, the headlines have been inescapable: Trump is a nasty authoritarian who wants to dismantle America’s democratic political system. This shouldn’t be all that surprising, since we heard similar cries ahead of his election 2016, namely over his support for a “Muslim ban” (a national security travel ban that included countries that are majority Muslim) and for mass deportations of illegal aliens.As the Iowa caucuses creep closer, the revamped, breathless accusations have increased in number and fervor.

Immediately after longtime West Virginia senator Joe Manchin bowed to political reality and called it quits on his re-election, Republicans celebrated that it virtually guarantees their party an elusive win next year.  In fact, some were already proclaiming that the state’s First Pup, Babydog, and her owner, Governor Jim Justice, are cruising to victory next November.  But that’s not necessarily the case — it’s not next November that Justice should be concerned with, but rather next year’s GOP primary. Justice, who finally secured Donald Trump’s valuable endorsement, faces Congressman Alex Mooney and a field that may now swell given the GOP’s virtual certainty to pick up the seat.