Going Postal: Take a couple of days off and what happens? Joe Biden announces that Sen. Kamala Harris is his running mate, only the third female vice presidential candidate and the first who is not white.

  President Trump is already questioning whether Harris is a legitimate US citizen eligible for the office. “I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump told reporters. “I have no idea if that’s right. I would have thought, I would have assumed, that the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”

  This is classic Trump to plant the lie with a question. Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, California, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. 

  A former prosecutor and now a senator for four years, Harris is part black, part Indian, married to a white Jewish man, and a hell of a lot smarter than the current Vice President who should tremble facing this woman in a debate.

  The former prosecutor over the past several years has stood out mercilessly grilling hapless Trump appointees. Fresh out of the gate Harris said, “The case against Donald Trump and Mike Pence is open-and-shut. Just look where they’ve gotten us.”

  Where they’ve gotten the US is economic disaster and massive unemployment. Yesterday the Labor department reported that unemployment claims last week dropped below one million for the first time since March. That’s what passes for good news these days.

  About the pandemic, Harris said, “There’s a reason it has hit America worse than any other advanced nation. It’s because of Trump’s failure to take it seriously from the start.”

  What Trump does take seriously is the threat posed to him by mail-in balloting this fall, and one way he can block that is by hampering the Postal Service’s ability to handle tens of millions of ballots. In an interview on the Fox Business Network, Trump cited proposals by House Democrats to allocate $25 billion to the USPS, and another $3 billion specifically to help it handle mail ballots. He said, “If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it.”

  White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow made one of the most telling statements on CNBC. He said, “So [many] of the Democratic asks are really liberal, left wishlists — voting rights and aid to aliens and so forth. That’s not our game, and the president can’t accept that kind of deal.

  The right to vote … that’s not their game.

The Middle East: In a development that would have been the lead story in normal times, Israel and the United Arab Emirates agreed Thursday to end decades of animosity in a historic deal announced by President Trump in which Israel agrees to put a hold on the annexation of West Bank territory.

  With this deal, the Emirates become only the third Arab country to have diplomatic relations with Israel. Egypt and Jordan long ago recognized Israel’s right to exist. 

Viral News: With daily fatalities spiking once more across the country, some health officials suspect that coronavirus deaths in the US may be even greater than the statistics suggest. 

  The official US toll this morning is 167,253. The NY Times  says their analysis shows that overall deaths in the US since March are 200,000 more than normal. The paper says that as hotspots have spread across the country, so have reports of deaths greater than the number attributed to the coronavirus.

The Admissions Department: In an escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign against race-based college admissions, the Justice Department has accused Yale University of discriminating against Asian-American and white applicants in undergraduate admissions. 

  After a two-year investigation, the Justice Department ordered Yale to suspend for one year the use of race or national origin in its admissions decisions. At the end of that year, Yale will need to seek permission from the government to use race as a factor again. 

 “There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination,” said Eric Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division. “Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocks fosters stereotypes, bitterness and division.”

Where’s the Beef?: If you want an idea of the intellectual level of campaigning you can expect from Vice President Mike Pence this fall, here’s a sample:

“Sen. Kamala Harris said she would change the dietary guidelines of this country to reduce the amount of red meat that Americans can eat. Well I’ve got some red meat for you: We’re not going to let Joe Biden & Kamala Harris cut America’s meat!”

The Bulletin Board: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is dropping his lawsuit against the mayor of Atlanta over her citywide mandatory mask-wearing ordinance, but promises a new executive order “with relevant language.” — The Pentagon is forming a new task force to investigate UFOs that have been sighted by US military pilots, CNN reports. The defense Department has increasingly taken seriously things the pilots have seen up there that no one seems able to explain. Keep in mind, what they see may only be civilian drones.

Bookbeat: President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen has released the foreword to his book “Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump.”

  In it, Cohen describes everything from “golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union.”

  Cohen writes that “I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” 

  And that’s just the teaser material.

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