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Date: August 30, 2024 at 18:54:31
From: old timer, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Harris defends shifting positions on fracking and decriminalizing ille |
URL: Harris defends shifting positions on fracking and decriminalizing illegal border crossings |
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instead of flip flops this article describes it as “shifting away from some of
her more liberal positions” and “reversals” of positions that she had
during her previous brief run for president
Harris defends shifting positions on fracking and decriminalizing illegal
border crossings
By — Zeke Miller, Associated Press
By — Colleen Long, Associated Press
Politics Aug 30, 2024 9:36 AM EDT
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday
defended shifting away from some of her more liberal positions in her first
major television interview of her presidential campaign, but insisted her
"values have not changed" even as she is "seeking consensus."
Sitting with her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris was asked
specifically about her reversals on banning fracking and decriminalizing
illegal border crossings, positions she took during her last run for
president. She confirmed she does not want to ban fracking, an energy
extraction process key to the economy of swing-state Pennsylvania, and
said there "should be consequence" for people who cross the border
without permission.
"I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy
perspective and decisions is my values have not changed," Harris said.
WATCH: Harris delivers remarks at campaign rally in Savannah on final day
of Georgia bus tour
She went on to say: "I believe it is important to build consensus. It is
important to find a common place of understanding where we can actually
solve the problem."
The interview with CNN's Dana Bash came as voters are still trying to
learn more about the Democratic ticket in an unusually compressed time
frame. President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid just five weeks ago.
The interview focused largely on policy, as Harris sought to show that she
had adopted more moderate positions on issues that Republicans argue
are extreme, while Walz defended past misstatements about his
biography.
Harris hadn't done an in-depth interview since she became her party's
standard-bearer five weeks ago, though she did sit for several while she
was still Biden's running mate.
She said serving with Biden was "one of the greatest honors of my
career," and she recounted the moment he called to tell her he was
stepping down and would support her.
"He told me what he had decided to do and … I asked him, 'Are you sure?'
and he said, 'Yes,' and that's how I learned about it."
She said she didn't ask Biden to endorse her because "he was very clear
that he was going to endorse me."
Harris defended the administration's record on the southern border and
immigration, noting that she was tasked with trying to address the "root
causes" in other countries that were driving the border crossings.
"We have laws that have to be followed and enforced, that address and
deal with people who cross our border illegally, and there should be
consequences," Harris said.
Asked about Israel's war in Gaza after Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, Harris said, "I
am unequivocal and unwavering in my commitment to Israel's defense and
its ability to defend itself." But the vice president also reiterated what
she's said for months, that civilian deaths are too high amid the Israeli
offensive.
She also brushed off Republican Donald Trump's questioning of her racial
identity after he suggested falsely that she changed how she presents
herself for political reasons and "happened to turn Black." Harris, who is
of Black and South Asian heritage, said Trump's suggestion was the
"same old, tired playbook."
"Next question, please," she said.
Trump and Harris are set to debate on Sept. 10. In a post Thursday
evening, it appeared Trump was paying close attention to the interview.
After the debate was mentioned, he posted, "I look so forward to Debating
Comrade Kamala Harris and exposing her for the fraud she is."
Trump went on to say that his Democratic opponent "has changed every
one of her long held positions, on everything. America will never allow an
Election WEAPONIZING MARXIST TO BE PRESIDENT OF THE U.S."
The debate will be the first-ever meeting for Harris and Trump. The
opponents had only been in the same space when Harris, as a senator,
attended Trump's joint addresses to Congress.
During the early parts of the interview, Walz watched quietly and nodded
when Harris made her main points. He was later asked about
misstatements, starting with how he has described his 24 years of service
in the National Guard.
In a 2018 video clip that the Harris-Walz campaign once circulated, Walz
spoke out against gun violence and said, "We can make sure that those
weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those
weapons are at."
Critics said the comment "that I carried in war" suggested that Walz
portrayed himself as someone who spent time in a combat zone. He said
Thursday night that he misspoke after a school shooting, adding, "My
grammar's not always correct."
Asked about statements that appeared to indicate that he and his wife
conceived their children with in-vitro fertilization, when they in fact used
a different fertility treatment, he said he believes most Americans
understood what he meant and pivoted to Republican opposition to
abortion rights.
Democrats' enthusiasm about their vote in November has surged over the
past few months, according to polling from Gallup. About 8 in 10
Democrats now say they are more enthusiastic than usual about voting,
compared with 55% in March.
This gives them an enthusiasm edge they did not have earlier this year.
Republicans' enthusiasm has increased by much less over the same
period, and about two-thirds of Republicans now say they are more
enthusiastic than usual about voting.
At a packed arena for a rally Thursday in Savannah, Harris cast her
nascent campaign as the underdog and encouraged the crowd to work
hard to elect her in November.
"We're here to speak truth and one of the things that we know is that this
is going to be a tight race to the end," she said.
Harris went through a list of Democratic concerns: that Trump will further
restrict women's rights after he appointed three judges to the U.S.
Supreme Court who helped overturn Roe, that he'd repeal the Affordable
Care Act, and that given new immunity powers granted presidents by the
U.S. Supreme Court, "imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails."
The rally was the end of a two-day bus tour in southeastern Georgia.
Harris has another campaign blitz on Labor Day with Biden in Detroit and
Pittsburgh with the election rapidly approaching. The first mail ballots get
sent to voters in just two weeks.
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[440509] [440510] [440476] [440480] |
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Date: August 31, 2024 at 10:08:19
From: Redhart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Harris defends shifting positions on fracking and decriminalizing... |
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/us/politics/trump-abortion-stance.html |
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Yes, she's picking her fights. And she is a moderate.
She's battled fracking as a DA and chief enforcer of
California law, too.
He underlying personal values have not changed, but she
has 2 mo of an election left. She's going to have to
pick her fights to run on.
That's realistic and pragmatic strategy.
Want to talk about how Trump just flipped on abortion?
Voting against abortion bans in Florida?
Some of his most fervent anti-abortion followers are
leaving now.
He's having to pick his fights, too.
We all knew he never cared about abortion, now didn't
we? He flipped because he needed and used a block of
extreme voters to seek power.
Now that the same issue is hurting him, he's flipping
back.
cnn video:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/30/politics/video/anthony-
scaramucci-donald-trump-abortion-sot-tsr-digvid
or, NYT article (link above):
Trump Contorts Himself on Abortion in Search of
Political Gain
The former president is willing to make as many
rhetorical and policy shifts as he deems necessary to
win in November, vexing some social conservatives.
At the age of 53, in a 1999 interview on NBC’s “Meet
the Press,” Donald J. Trump described himself as “very
pro-choice.”
In 2011, without any explanation about the change, he
informed a packed room at a conservative conference
that he was now “pro-life.”
In 2016, as a Republican candidate for president, he
told the MSNBC host Chris Matthews that he had become
so ardently opposed to abortion rights that he would
even support punishments for women who got abortions.
He did not realize that this position went too far even
for the social conservatives to whom he was trying to
pander, and he quickly reversed himself.
The 2024 version of Mr. Trump is once again tying
himself in knots — but this time the stakes could not
be higher.
The latest example came on Friday, when Mr. Trump —
nearly a full day after his campaign had to clean up
his suggestion that he might support a Florida ballot
measure allowing abortion up to 24 weeks following
backlash from social conservatives — told Fox News that
he would vote against it.
Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as
the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade
— that the move would hurt his party. Since that year,
when Republicans underperformed expectations in the
midterm elections, Mr. Trump has been privately
emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion
issue alone could kill their chances of victory in
November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical
and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.
It is through that narrow political lens that Mr. Trump
has been weighing the subject, despite his role in
reshaping the Supreme Court that overturned the
landmark 1973 abortion decision.
The results have been confusing and fluid, a
contradictory mess of policy statements as he has once
again tried to rebrand himself on an issue that many of
his supporters view in strict moral terms, and had come
to believe that he did, too.
Mr. Trump’s shifting views have been especially
difficult for social conservatives to navigate. Some
anti-abortion leaders in his orbit have tried lobbying
him to align his public position with theirs. Many
others are staying quiet and sticking by him, hoping
that what he is saying now is just an act to get
elected and that, if he does get elected, he will again
govern as “the most pro-life president” in American
history.
“I don’t think he’s losing support, but no question,
his acquiescence is confusing to people,” said Chad
Connelly, a former chairman of the South Carolina
Republican Party who leads the nonprofit Faith Wins and
has a following of hundreds of pastors.
However, he added that the contrast between Vice
President Kamala Harris’s actions “versus Trump’s
words” meant social conservatives would “look back and
see the most pro-life president in American history.”
Still, even by Mr. Trump’s standards, the past few
weeks have been head-spinning for people trying to keep
track of his slippery social conservatism.
In 2016, Mr. Trump won with the help of a socially
conservative running mate, Mike Pence, and with a
promise that he would appoint justices who would end
Roe. Publicly, Mr. Trump has repeatedly bragged about
doing just that, and has falsely claimed that Democrats
wanted it as much as Republicans did.
In private, Mr. Trump was agitated by the speeches at
the Democratic National Convention, according to a
person close to him, many of which tied him to Project
2025, an effort by people supportive of Mr. Trump to
develop policy proposals for him if he wins that
include restrictive ideas for reproductive measures. He
was especially bothered by Ms. Harris’s assertions that
a second Trump term would further imperil abortion
rights.
He felt so defensive about the subject that on the
morning of Aug. 23, the day after Ms. Harris’s speech,
Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social a sentence that sounded
as if it could have come from the head of Planned
Parenthood rather than a Republican candidate for
president.
“My Administration,” he wrote, “will be great for women
and their reproductive rights.”
Asked to comment, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for
Mr. Trump, maintained in an emailed statement that Mr.
Trump “has long been consistent in supporting the
rights of states to make decisions on abortion and has
been very clear that he will not sign a federal ban
when he is back in the White House.”
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440510 |
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Date: August 31, 2024 at 10:11:33
From: Redhart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: about that flip flopping... |
URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/trump-betrays-pro-life-movement/679622/ |
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Trump’s Evangelical Supporters Just Lost Their Best
Excuse
The pro-life justification for supporting the former
president has now collapsed.
By Peter Wehner
The most common argument made by former President
Donald Trump’s evangelical supporters in defense of
their support is that although Trump may not be a moral
exemplar, what matters most in electing a president is
his policies. And for them, abortion is primus inter
pares.
Trump is a great pro-life champion, they say, perhaps
the greatest in history, and that is what most
distinguishes him from the abortion extremism of Kamala
Harris. On that basis alone, they insist, Trump,
regardless of his faults and failures, deserves their
votes.
I understand that line of argument, though I strongly
disagree with it. The rationale was always weaker than
Trump’s supporters were willing to admit, because
Trump’s moral depravity was always far worse and more
dangerous than they were willing to acknowledge. And
his achievements fell far short of their hopes and
claims to end abortion.
But the pro-life justification for supporting Trump has
just collapsed. Trump, who described himself as
“strongly pro-choice” in the 1990s—including support
for so-called partial-birth abortion—has returned to
his socially liberal ways. “My Administration will be
great for women and their reproductive rights,” he
recently declared on Truth Social. Kamala Harris
couldn’t have stated it any more emphatically.... (rest
at link, but unable to copy as there's a paywall. If
someone else has a subscription, feel free to complete-
-but I think this makes my point).
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440476 |
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Date: August 30, 2024 at 19:23:36
From: georg, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Harris defends shifting positions on fracking and decriminalizing... |
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not one word about the "green new deal"? I'm sure that's
what she said ... did she know that most people would
not have one ... and EV ... if they were giving them
away?
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[440480] |
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440480 |
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Date: August 30, 2024 at 20:37:35
From: old timer, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Harris defends shifting positions on fracking and... |
URL: https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/29/politics/harris-walz-interview-read-transcript/index.html |
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dana bash said green new deal first asking kamala about her change on
fracking which she previously said she would ban but has since changed
to saying she will not ban it
see the transcript
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