Kamala Harris prebuts Trump's convention address with racial justice-focused speech

Sen. Kamala Harris, the 2020 Democratic vice presidential nominee, pledged she and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would stand with peaceful protesters if elected to the White House in a wide-ranging prebuttal to President Trump's Republican convention acceptance speech. "The Republican convention is designed for one purpose: to soothe Donald Trump’s ego, to make him feel good. But here's the thing: He’s the president of the United States. It’s not supposed to be about him," Harris said Thursday in Washington, D.C. In a 20-minute address, Harris criticized Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, claiming he "froze" when he needed to take action. The mostly virtual convention this week hasn't focused on the coronavirus, with White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow even referring to the pandemic in the past tense. "He was scared, and he was petty and vindictive," Harris said of Trump, ripping the president's preoccupation with the state of the stock market and dismantling Obamacare. The California Democrat added, "The president he has been is the president he will be, but we have a chance to right these wrongs and put America on a better path forward."

Convention speakers have, among other objectives, used the platform to push a "law and order" message after Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old black man, was shot seven times in the back last weekend by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blake had told the officers, who were responding to a domestic dispute, he had a knife in his car. Tensions in the community escalated this week when 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot three protesters demonstrating against racial injustice and police brutality, killing two and injuring another. The Antioch, Illinois, teenager has been charged with first-degree murder. Harris, the first African American and South Asian woman to feature on a major party's presidential ticket, said the Kenosha shooting was a reminder that "a black person in America has never been treated as fully human." Peaceful protests and protesters should be defended and not confused "with those looting and committing acts of violence," said Harris, a former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney. "Make no mistake. We will not let these vigilantes and extremists derail the path to justice. Here's my promise to those mothers and fathers and all who stand with them: In a Biden-Harris administration, you will have a seat at the table, in the halls of Congress, and in the White House," she said. Trump is expected to accept the Republican presidential nomination Thursday on the White House South Lawn with a searing indictment of Democratic standard-bearer Biden. “At no time before have voters faced a clearer choice between two parties, two visions, two philosophies, or two agendas," Trump says in his prepared remarks. “At the Democrat convention, you barely heard a word about their agenda. But that's not because they don't have one. It's because their agenda is the most extreme set of proposals ever put forward by a major party nominee."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/kamala-harris-prebuts-trumps-convention-address-with-racial-justice-focused-speech

Philippines warns Beijing it will enlist US help if China attacks

A violent encounter between China and the Philippines would trigger a confrontation with the United States, according to an unusual warning from Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration. If "something happens that is beyond incursion but is, in fact, an attack on, say, a Filipino naval vessel … then I call up Washington, D.C.,” Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin said during a national broadcast this week. That’s a rare threat from Manila, as Duterte often takes a hostile tone with the U.S. while seeking to curry favor with China. Locsin was alluding to the Mutual Defense Treaty with the U.S. amid heightened tensions in the South China Sea, where China has built artificial islands and conducted military exercises to assert sovereignty over waterways claimed by the Philippines and other countries. And it comes just days after his defense counterpart dismissed Beijing’s claims. “Their so-called historical rights over an area enclosed by their nine-dash line don’t exist except in their imaginations,” Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said on Sunday. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a landmark declaration in July that China’s territorial claims in the region “are completely unlawful.” The statement seems to have encouraged some governments in the region to offer more emphatic rejections of China’s ambitions. “To have them say it, and to have the foreign secretary say it on a nationwide news broadcast in prime time clearly is an important bit of signaling,” said Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst Gregory Poling. “The other thing that signals, to me, at least, is that President Duterte is giving Locsin and Lorenzana much more room to improve the alliance.” Duterte had proven deferential to China in recent years. “The president’s stand is clear: He will put [forward] the national interest of the Philippines, in view of a clash between the two superpowers,” presidential spokesman Harry Roque Jr. told reporters Wednesday, even as Locsin touted the security pact with the U.S. Roque added that the Philippines plans on “being friends to all, and enemy to no one.”

That comment is more muted than some of Duterte’s rhetoric, particularly following months of controversy over his aborted plan to scrap a military agreement with the U.S. out of anger that American officials had revoked the visa of a political ally. The new rhetorical shift may have been influenced by State Department efforts to resolve a visa controversy that centered on a Duterte ally implicated in extrajudicial killings, but even Locsin made clear this week that Duterte isn’t going to get too close to the U.S. Noting he had rejected a U.S. request related to closer relations between the two countries' Coast Guards, he tweeted, "We don't share a coastline with the U.S. like Canada does. So no, nunca, never.” That rebuff suggests that Manila is hesitant to allow the U.S. to fortify even its nonmilitary presence in the country, despite the potential value of Coast Guard contacts in disputes with China over fishing rights in the contested waters of the South China Sea. “At the end of the day, if they need help, they're still going to be calling us asking for help,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper said. “I think the really critical thing then is if the Philippines wants the United States to be able to help them in this kind of crisis, we have to have access to facilities in the Philippines that would allow us to actually uphold our treaty obligations.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/philippines-warns-beijing-it-will-enlist-us-help-if-china-attacks

>>10445150

Baker see:

>>10444948 Kamala Harris prebuts Trump's convention address with racial justice-focused speech

>>10444975

Twitter removes fake accounts pretending to be black voters who left Democratic Party for Trump

Twitter took down two fake accounts that were spreading information about black voters abandoning the Democratic Party amid months of unrest. The removed accounts were perceived to have been run by black voters, with tweets that often went viral. One of the accounts, @WentDemToRep, got 11,000 retweets on a tweet that said they were a lifelong Democrat who was pushed to vote Republican by the Black Lives Matter movement, according to NBC News. The tweet was posted shortly after the creation of the account on Tuesday.

Two other accounts tagged by the bot, @PeterGammo and @KRon619, were also suspended on Tuesday. A tweet by @KRon619 read the user was a Democrat their entire life until July and was retweeted over 12,000 times. Other posts urging black, brown, and white people to leave the Democratic Party got over 6,000 retweets, and others attacking "the Democrat media" and protesters in cities got over 12,000 retweets. The three suspended accounts broke the social media giant's policies on spam and for engaging in "specifically, artificially manipulative behavior." The accounts used images of black men as their profile pictures, including a photo stolen from the Instagram page of Nelis Joustra, who tried to get the account removed. "I called my mom and asked her what to do because I was stressing out," Joustra said. "The only thing I could do was to report the account and tweet some tweets to tell people that I'm not the person who owns the account and that they're using me on the profile picture without asking me." Twitter previously said it would crack down on disinformation as the 2020 election draws closer.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/twitter-removes-fake-accounts-pretending-to-be-black-voters-who-left-democratic-party-for-trump

>>10445308

That pic of Cuomo reminds me of the Godfather Movie..

>>10445314

Wondering if Nothing But Crap is helping them do this!

>>10445335

>>10445449