The panel on MSNBC's "Morning Joe' was wowed on Wednesday morning after sharing a supercut clip from Tuesday night's DNC roll call from Chicago that was run concurrently with a jam-packed rally hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris in Milwaukee. The clip contrasted the rowdy Harris reception with the grim roll call from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee weeks ago, which led co-host Joe Scarborough to blurt: "wow." Once that clip, along with a clip of comments made by Harris completed, MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski contributed "That was just the beginning.
" ALSO READ: Why Kamala Harris may get a big convention polling ‘bounce’ "Just wow, Willie," Scarborough added by addressing co-host Willie Geist. "I mean, you talk about a show of force, a show of power. That was impressive, I don't think I've seen anything like that before.
15,000 in Milwaukee? Just packed! And then, you know, in Chicago also at the convention. Wow, that was crazy." "Yeah.
20,000 in Chicago and 15,000 in Milwaukee, perfect stage-craft as well," Geist agreed. Watch below or at the link. - YouTube youtu.
be The Democratic governor of Kentucky, Andy Beshear , slammed Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), saying he "makes himself the victim" in order to deflect from having to defend his views on abortion in the cases of familial rape.
At issue was a comment that Vance made during a September 2021 interview. "Look, I think two wrongs don't make a right. At the end of day, we are talking about an unborn baby.
What kind of society do we want to have? A society that looks at unborn babies as inconveniences to be discarded?" Vance said in 2021. READ MORE: ‘My Wife Had This Baby’: J.D.
Vance Trounced for ‘Misogynistic’ Views on Women and Family "My view on this has been very clear and I think the question betrays a certain presumption that is wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.
We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have the right to life. Right now our society doesn’t afford that and I think it's a tragedy and I think we can do better," he continued . Beshear appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe Tuesday.
He was asked about how Vance and former President Donald Trump's abortion policy. Vance in particular has pushed for a federal abortion ban. Beshear criticized Vance's choice of words in that original interview.
“JD Vance calls pregnancy resulting from rape, ‘inconvenient.’ Inconvenience is traffic. I mean, it is.
Make him go through this,” Beshear said in the clip, adding that Republicans like Vance "don't have any empathy at all" when it comes to abortion. Vance took Beshear's comments to mean that he was hoping one of Vance's loved ones were assaulted. "What the hell is this? Why is @AndyBeshearKY wishing that a member of my family would get raped?!? What a disgusting person," Vance wrote on X .
Beshear told reporters later on Tuesday that not only was that not what he meant, but that Vance was just making "an attempt to deflect," according to the Courier Journal . He also clarified that he was not wishing harm. He only wanted Vance to be able to "put himself in a different position and to understand why having exceptions, having reproductive freedom is so important in the first place.
" “I mean, J.D. Vance knows that he and Donald Trump are so wrong on this issue.
And so he’s trying to make himself the victim. Listen, Hadley Duvall was a victim, so were the women that were on the stage last night. The couple that had to go through a non-viable pregnancy are victims,” Beshear said, according to Mediaite .
Duvall appeared on stage at the Democratic National Convention Monday night, telling the crowd how she was impregnated by her stepfather at the age of 12. During her speech, she had harsh words directed to Trump, and his comments calling abortion bans "a beautiful thing." "What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent's child?" Duvall asked.
The lightning rise of Kamala Harris in the race for the White House has energized Democrats across the United States -- but it is also delivering a boost to merchandise vendors. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, a cornucopia of swag themed around the internet-friendly vice president and her running mate Tim Walz is enticing delegates to part with their cash. Vendors in the city's downtown area told AFP it had been looking like a depressingly slow summer.
That is until Harris jumped into the race, aiming to become the first woman in the Oval Office, and only the second non-white president in US history after Barack Obama . "It's fair to say that the excitement and the enthusiasm that has surrounded Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, there's no comparison as far as Joe Biden or even Donald Trump , really," stallholder Brian Randolph told AFP outside McCormick Place, one of the main convention venues. "This definitely has a Barack Obama feel to it, because it's an opportunity to make history.
People are proud to make history." The 54-year-old Alabaman said his Pittsburgh-based apparel company hadn't even bothered trying to manufacture campaign merch until Harris threw her hat in the ring. Now business is booming.
- 'Momentum is growing' - Favorites include T-shirts emblazoned with Harris's face, as well as items bearing the slogans "We have the audacity to believe" or -- in a nod to the contrast Democrats see between former California attorney general Harris and Trump -- "Prosecutor vs. Felon." Experts say exciting merchandise, while unlikely to convert the other side, can drive small-dollar donations and turnout among those already on board with the cause.
Randolph's firm, Wise Sayings, has been following Harris's campaign around the country and says enthusiasm and sales have been ticking up. "The momentum is growing," he told AFP with a grin. "Sales are great.
.. Mostly, every customer is getting more than one item," he added.
In the era of Trump rallies, it is Republicans who have been associated with campaign merchandise, with supporters showing up to campaign events wearing red hats and T-shirts bearing his campaign slogan "Make America Great Again." Inside the Democratic convention's "DemPalooza" expo, however, a cottage industry of Harris-themed products has sprung up, offering t-shirts, coffee-table books, posters, pens, mugs and jewelry. - 'Cat Ladies for Kamala' - Swag-hungry Democrats snap up Harris-Walz camo hats and "Cat Ladies for Kamala" stickers mocking Republican vice presidential candidate J.
D. Vance , who once claimed that the Democratic Party was run by childless women who vest all their affection in their feline friends. They rest tired feet at the Coconut Club, a relaxing space that nods to a viral quote from Harris about the tropical fruit, and snap selfies with cardboard cutouts of the VP and buy Harris-inspired friendship bracelets.
Beside stalls selling the lighthearted wares are organizations such Voters of Tomorrow and the Progressive Turnout Project that are seeking to capitalize on the buzz around Harris to juice support for Democratic candidates across the country. Brite Blue Dot, a business that connects Democrats in deeply Republican areas, was offering Kamala car stickers. The company sells merchandise displaying a blue dot denoting that the owner is progressive, allowing them to show their allegiance without attracting unwelcome attention.
The symbol mostly goes under the radar but can pique curiosity, start conversations or connect like-minded voters without offending conservatives, says founder Joellyn Beckham. "It's just a symbol to say when you're in traffic, if you see one of these, you're not by yourself," Beckham told AFP. In a plant nursery in northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region, hundreds of pine, eucalyptus, olive and pomegranate saplings grow under awnings protecting them from the fierce summer sun.
The nursery in Sarchinar in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah is part of efforts to battle the destructive effects of deforestation in the region. "Almost 50 percent of forests have been lost in Kurdistan in 70 years," said Nyaz Ibrahim of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP). She attributed the loss to "water scarcity, rising temperatures, irregular decreasing rainfall and also fire incidents".
The loss is catastrophic, as the Kurdistan region is home to 90 percent of forests in Iraq, which has been among the hardest hit globally by climate change and desertification. Much of this comes down to illegal tree felling and forest fires -- intensified by summer droughts -- as well as military operations on Iraq's northern border. In the nursery -- the oldest in Iraq -- workers are busy unloading young saplings from a trailer which they then line up on a patch of land.
Here, some 40 varieties are developed to later be planted in forests or given to farmers, among them pines, cypresses, junipers and oaks -- the emblematic tree of the Kurdish forest. "Climate change has an impact on the development of plants," said agricultural engineer Rawa Abdulqader. "So we prioritize trees that can withstand high temperatures and which consume less water.
" - 'Negligence' - With support from the WFP, micro-mesh nets were installed in the nursery to protect the trees from the sun, accelerating growth and minimizing evaporation. Other greenhouses have been equipped with hanging sprinklers, which are more water-efficient. The project has helped Sarchinar's annual production grow from 250,000 sprouts before it began in late 2022, to 1.
5 million in 2024. Over five years, the WFP intends to support authorities and local actors to plant 38 million trees over more than 61,000 hectares in Kurdistan, and work to preserve 65,000 forested hectares. According to two official studies, between 1957 and 2015, more than 600,000 hectares were lost.
Over the last 14 years, some 290,000 hectares have been hit by fires, said Halkawt Ismail, director of the forestry office in Kurdistan's agriculture ministry. These fires "break out mainly during the summer drought..
. and above all because of the negligence of citizens", he said. He added that illegal logging in the 1990s by locals using the wood to warm their homes during an economic crisis had significantly contributed to the shrinking of forests.
- Conflict and displacement - Elsewhere in Kurdistan, forests have been the collateral damage of fighting between the Turkish army and militants from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). This summer, Kurdish media and organisations said Ankara's bombardment of the PKK triggered several forest fires. In late June, the Turkish defence ministry accused the PKK of lighting fires to reduce visibility and conceal its positions.
"Turkey has established over 40 military outposts and bases" in Iraqi Kurdistan, "logged many dozens of kilometres of roads through forested areas, and cleared forest around their bases," Wim Zwijnenburg, a researcher with the Dutch peace-building group PAX, told AFP. "This practice has increased sharply since 2020," he said. A decrease in forest supervision resulting from conflict and displacement, and rising temperatures and drought "provide fertile ground for forest fires".
These can either be the result of "natural causes, or of bombing and fighting from the Turkey-PKK conflicts", he added. "With limited or absent forest management, these fires can affect larger areas and lead to forest loss," Zwijnenburg said. Kamaran Osman, human rights officer from the Community Peacemaker Teams organization, meanwhile noted that when areas are bombed, "people cannot go to.
.. extinguish the fire, because they fear being bombed as well.
" - 1 million oaks - Authorities are working to cultivate new forests and to increase nursery production, though they lack sufficient human and financial resources. Civil society has also got involved. In Sulaimaniyah, which is encircled by hills, activists are fighting bulldozers and excavators eating away at the slopes of Mount Goizha for a real estate project.
On the edges of the city, luxury housing complexes and shiny glass towers are already rising on the hillside. In the regional capital of Arbil, a campaign launched by local organizations aims to plant 1 million oak trees. Since 2021, 300,000 trees have been planted, said Gashbin Idrees Ali, the project manager.
"Climate change is happening and we cannot stop it. But we should adapt to it," he said. Oak trees were chosen because they "need less water", he said.
"We supervise the tree's growth for four to five years and after...
it can survive for hundreds of years.".
