At Tuesday's White House press conference, President Donald Trump spent a considerable portion of the time attacking Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), who was just announced to be former Vice President Joe Biden's running mate.
Harris, complained Trump, was the "meanest and most disrespectful person in the U.S. Senate." He particularly dwelled on her sharp interrogation of Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court hearings.
Trump also added that she "lied" about a number of issues, claimed repeatedly she wants to raise taxes, said she is for "open borders and sanctuary cities ... which is also protecting a large number of criminals," and that she would destroy the Second Amendment.
"I thought [Biden] would have gone a different way," he concluded, before ending the press conference.
On Tuesday, former Vice President Joe Biden selected Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate for the 2020 presidential election.
MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance noted the kind words by the women who were passed over during Biden's selection process.
Allen noted that Stacey Abrams, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice.
" Trump has finally succeeded at something: He's united the Democratic Party behind its ticket," she noted.
Here's what they were saying about Harris joining the ticket:
On Tuesday, following the selection of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) for former Vice President Joe Biden's running mate, ex-President Barack Obama released a statement lauding the choice.
"Choosing a vice president is the first important decision a president makes," wrote Obama. "Joe Biden nailed this decision. By choosing Senator Kamala Harris as America’s next vice president, he's underscored his own judgment and character."
"I've known Senator Harris for a long time. She is more than prepared for the job," continued Obama. "She's spent her career defending our Constitution and fighting for the folks who need a fair shake. Her own life story is one that I and so many others can see ourselves in: a story that says that no matter where you come from, what you look like, who you worship, or who you love, there's a place for you here. It's a fundamentally American perspective, one that's led us out of the hardest times before. And it's a perspective we can all rally behind right now."
Obama closed out by writing, "Now let's go win this thing."
President Donald Trump has labeled U.S. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), just announced as Joe Biden's vice presidential running mate, "phony," and Biden's "political living will."
"Not long ago Kamala Harris called Joe Biden a racist and asked for an apology she never received," the Trump campaign said in a statement. That is false.
"Clearly, Phony Kamala will abandon her own morals, as well as try to bury her record as a prosecutor, in order to appease the anti-police extremists controlling the Democrat Party," the statement, allegedly penned by Katrina Pierson, continues.
Shortly after former Vice President Joe Biden announced Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) as his running mate, Donald Trump Jr. tried to mock the ticket by pointing out that Harris wanted to investigate allegations that Biden made some women uncomfortable with hugs and other physically close gestures.
Commenters on social media immediately buried Trump Jr. — reminding him that his father is facing dozens of accusations of harassment, assault, and rape for which he has never been brought to account.
MSNBC anchor Nicolle Wallace called into her network while driving with her son and dog during vacation to add her latest reporting on Joe Biden's pick of Kamala Harris to be his running mate.
"The other piece of reporting I've picked up in the past week was from the Trump team, that from their viewpoint, because Donald Trump has no capacity to understand that this is the selection of a person to run the government with the president, he only saw this in terms of casting for the night of primetime coverage that is the vice presidential debate, and this was the pick that scared them the most," Wallace told MSNBC's Brian Williams.
"They thought she would more than go toe-to-toe with [Mike] Pence, they thought she could chew him up and spit him out and pointed to her cross-examination of one Bill Barr," she explained.
"I don't know that there's a better debater or questioner on the political field right now," Wallace said. Her skill-set is unmatched in terms much being able to articulate an argument, to patiently wait to make her point and look at the argument that the democratic ticket has to make."
This Tuesday, 2020 presidential candidate Joe Bidenannounced that his running mate will be Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA). The news, although not unexpected, brought joy to fans of Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolph, whose comedic portrayal of Harris is a favorite.
Writing for NBC News this Tuesday, Sahil Kapur contends that President Trump's "master negotiator" persona is all just a ruse, as evidenced by the recent breakdown in coronavirus relief talks.
"Not only is the president detached from the nitty-gritty of policy, he has shown a knack for delegating the task of negotiation to hard-liners with a limited grasp of how Democrats think, aides in both parties bemoan," Kapur writes.
Trump will invariably blame Democrats for his failures to secure deals, but Democrats -- and some Republicans -- blame Trump's choices when it comes to the people he surrounds himself with.
"A senior Senate Republican aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said the dearth of good negotiators around Trump is 'indicative of the fact that, with a few exceptions, he is dealing with C-list talent in his administration,'" writes Kapur.
Trump will continue to say Democrats are the problem, but the struggle to reach meaningful agreements "spans issues from health care to infrastructure to immigration and challenges the personal brand of a president who once said, 'Deals are my art form,'" writes Kapur.
Joe Biden, the Democratic Party's presumptive 2020 nominee for president, will be joined on the ticket by Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), who will serve as his running mate.
The choice of a running mate has added significance this year because of Biden's age. He turns 78 on November 20 and would be the oldest man ever to assume the office if he defeats Trump, as polls predict.
"The vice-presidential pick this year is so much more important than it normally is because people expect Biden to only serve one term," said David Barker, a professor of government at American University.
"And so whomever he picks as vice president is likely to be the next Democratic candidate for president in four years," Barker said.
Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican-born father and Indian-born mother, served as a district attorney in San Francisco before becoming attorney general of California, the first woman to hold the post in the most populous US state.
She was elected to the Senate in 2016, just the second black woman elected to the body and the first woman of South Asian heritage.
Harris challenged Biden for the Democratic nomination but dropped out of the race in December 2019 and threw her support behind Biden, the former vice president and senator from Delaware, in March.
Biden and Harris clashed during an early Democratic primary debate but he appears not to hold it against her.
"He roped himself into a certain group of people," Trump told Fox Sports Radio in an early morning phone-in interview.
"Some people would say men are insulted by that and some people would say it is fine," Trump said.
Declaring that he wants a government as diverse as the country itself, Biden committed early in his campaign, in March, that he would name a woman on the ticket.
Only two other women have been nominated vice presidential candidates -- Sarah Palin by the Republican party in 2008 and Geraldine Ferraro by the Democrats in 1984 -- and neither made it into the White House. No woman has won the presidency either.
In the radio interview, Trump praised his own vice president, Mike Pence, but said bluntly: "people don't vote for the vice president, they really don't."
"You can pick a George Washington to be a vice president. Let's pick up Abraham Lincoln, coming back from the dead. They just don't seem to vote for the vice president."
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
In my synthetic chemistry lab, we have worked out how to convert the red pigment in common bricks into a plastic that conducts electricity, and this process enabled us to turn bricks into electricity storage devices. These brick supercapacitors could be connected to solar panels to store rechargeable energy. Supercapacitors store electric charge, in contrast to batteries, which store chemical energy.
Brick’s porous structure is ideal for storing energy because pores give brick more surface area than solid materials have, and the greater the surface area the more electricity a supercapacitor material can hold. Bricks are red because the clay they’re made from contains iron oxide, better known as rust, which is also important in our process.
We fill the pores in bricks with an acid vapor that dissolves the iron oxide and converts it to a reactive form of iron that makes our chemical syntheses possible. We then flow a different gas through the cavities to fill them with a sulfur-based material that reacts with iron. This chemical reaction leaves the pores coated with an electrically conductive plastic, PEDOT.
The resulting film coats the brick surfaces with nanofibers that resemble the fine filaments produced by fungi. The nanofiber structure of our conducting polymer has low electrical resistance as well as high surface area, which makes it ideal for energy related applications.
Chemically altering the red in ordinary bricks to become a nanofibrous plastic turns bricks into supercapacitors capable of storing enough electricity to power LED lights.
A few pieces of PEDOT-coated brick are able to power an LED, and based on our calculations approximately 60 regular sized bricks would be able to power emergency lighting for 50 minutes, and they would take 13 minutes to recharge. One of the surprising results of our research is that the supercapacitor brick wall can be recharged 10,000 times, which is on par with more traditional PEDOT supercapacitors. We have published our results in the journal Nature Communications.
Why it matters
We have converted iron oxide, which is a ubiquitous waste product, into a reactive intermediate - a substance useful in chemical reactions. By controlling a chemical reaction that uses this intermediate, we have produced state-of-the-art semiconducting nanofiber coatings.
Turning rust into a useful chemical source material is cost-effective and demonstrates how inert materials hold the potential to be transformative in chemical manufacturing. Our work shows how waste can be upcycled and reused for producing cutting edge materials that extend the functional limitations of construction materials.
What other research is being done in this field?
Our work is the first to demonstrate energy storage in bricks, however other researchers are chemically altering bricks for other uses. The red pigment in bricks has been used as a chemical catalyst, however this requires significant processing to ensure the purity of the separated iron oxide. Metal oxide nanoparticles have also been combined both with brick and concrete to remove atmospheric pollutants. Other groups have created bricks that incorporate carbon nanomaterials to form electrodes that can conduct electricity.
What’s next
We need to increase the amount of energy our bricks can store by an order of magnitude. We are working on ways to convert the structure of the nanofibers into composites that contain other semiconductors in order to boost the amount of energy the nanofibers can store.
We are scaling up the chemical synthesis so we can reduce cost and produce polymer-coated bricks rapidly. We are also developing new chemical syntheses that promote self-assembly inside bricks to cause the nanofibers to form 3D patterns, which will increase surface area.
Our goal is to develop bricks that are patterned and ready to be stacked without the need for wires. We intend to produce devices that can be assembled like Lego blocks.
Attorney General Bill Barr was spotted walking into Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's office on Tuesday afternoon but when reporters asked why he was there, the Justice Department refused to say why.
Barr has been teasing a conspiracy that former President Barack Obama, and by extension, former Vice President Joe Biden, were part of a spying operation of the Trump campaign. After special counsel Robert Mueller finalized his report, Barr wrote a false summary of the findings and then announced that he would hire U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the investigators.
"The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" is getting turned upside-down as a gritty drama set to be executive produced by Will Smith, Hollywood trade publications reported Tuesday.
The idea for a dark modern-day "reimagining" of the smash hit 1990s sitcom that launched Smith's acting career came from superfan Morgan Cooper, who shot and posted his own four-minute trailer last year.
Two versions of the trailer have been viewed over seven million times and won over Smith himself, who met Cooper last year and praised his "brilliant" idea.
"Morgan did a ridiculous trailer for 'Bel-Air' -- a brilliant idea, the dramatic version of 'The Fresh Prince' for the next generation," Smith said on his YouTube channel at the time.
According to the Hollywood Reporter and Deadline, the project is now in development with Smith's Westbrook Studios and Universal TV, and being pitched to various streaming platforms including Netflix.
The project would feature hour-long dramatic episodes telling the story of how Smith's character became embroiled in a fight with Philadelphia gang members before being sent to live with wealthy relatives in the affluent Los Angeles suburb of Bel-Air.
"I envision the first season being the rest of his junior year -- there's no worse time for a kid to land in a new place, in the middle of the school year," Cooper told Smith last year.
Cooper's trailer includes a young Will's first meeting with popular characters from the original series, including Jazz -- alias Jazzy Jeff -- at a Los Angeles record store.
Cooper will co-write the script, direct and be credited as a co-executive producer, working alongside several original members of the "Fresh Prince" creative team and showrunner Chris Collins ("The Wire") according to reports.
Smith and Cooper's representatives did not immediately respond to AFP request for comment.
"The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" ran for six seasons from 1990-1996, becoming a global hit. It showcased the acting and comedic talents of Smith, then a young rapper who would go on to become one of Hollywood's biggest movie stars.
An investigation into President Donald Trump's financial information has uncovered that the president lied about the value of his Scottish and Irish golf resorts.
Politico reported Tuesday that three of his resorts had an intentionally inflated value in six years of financial records given to the U.S. government. Now, the American Democracy Legal Fund (ADLF), the group behind the finding wants to know why.
" Trump claimed the resorts — Trump International Golf Links Aberdeen and Trump Turnberry, both in Scotland, and Trump Doonbeg in Ireland — brought in a total of about $179 million in revenue on U.S. documents where he is supposed to list his personal income," wrote Politico's Anita Kumar. "Records in the United Kingdom and Ireland indicate the resorts‘ revenues were millions of dollars less — about $152 million — and show they actually lost $77 million after accounting for expenses."
In 2018, Trump said that the Scottish resorts were worth at least $100 million when he disclosed it in the documents, but the U.K. disputed it because Trump had more than $80 million in debts that same year.
“Our research has uncovered numerous examples of the Trump Organization reporting potentially fraudulent financial details to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in addition to apparent inconsistencies, misstatements, and lies in President Trump’s annual financial disclosure filings regarding its overseas golf courses,” said American Democracy Legal Fund (ADLF) President Brad Woodhouse.
The ADLF is now asking Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. to take a closer look into whether Trump broke the law by lying on the financial forms, a letter sent to Vance and the FBI said.
It was revealed last week that Vance is looking at a broader investigation of bank and insurance fraud as part of his request to garner financial documents from Trump's bank and accountants.
On his financial disclosure documents, Trump said that his two Scottish resorts garnered about $116 million between 2014 and 2018, and the British filings show $106 million in expenses and revenue. Those documents to the British government, Companies House, show about $65 million after expenses. Turnberry hasn't been able to turn a profit in the past five years, the U.K. records show.
Trump Doonbeg, his Irish golf club, brought in about $10.7 million annually for about $62.7 million in profits between 2014 and 2018, the records show. It was about $46 million after expenses.
