Month: July 2019

(CNN) — Although many people view Memorial Day as the American holiday that unofficially kicks off summer, it could be argued that the Fourth of July is summer’s biggest, best holiday.

Gatherings often involve hot dogs and hamburgers and ice cream, not to mention those colorful explosions in the sky, otherwise known as fireworks.

Check out these big July 4 events sure to please the fireworks fan, parade seeker and eating-contest enthusiast.

Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks

Kelly Clarkson is scheduled sing “God Bless America” in honor of the song’s 100th anniversary, and this year viewers can expect to see neon pinwheels, swirling water fountains, ghosting fans and pulsing hearts.

Washington, D.C.,Fourth of July Celebration

Fireworks explode over the National Mall in the nation’s capital.

Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

Big and Loud: This is how Washington’s National Mall Fireworks are described on the National Park Service’s website. Snagging a spot on the coveted steps of the Lincoln Memorial won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.

Still, there are plenty of viewing areas in and around the D.C. area on July 4 — try one of the city’s rooftop bars or catch them from across the river in Arlington — if you’d prefer to avoid the massive crowds sure to be gathered in the National Mall area.

Granbury’s Old-Fashioned 4th of July Celebration

Presented by the Granbury Chamber of Commerce in this Texas town, about 35 miles southwest of Fort Worth, the 4th of July celebration is a two-day affair. You can bet this means there’s a lot more than just fireworks on the agenda.

CEO Mike Scott says they’re expecting somewhere around 50,000 people to attend the events, but he noted that the parade alone draws a crowd upward of 20,000 folks. Those are impressive numbers for a town with a population of less than 10,000.

The celebration takes place in the historic townhouse square. Purchase a beer from one of the bars on the square’s perimeter (open containers are OK here), before grabbing a bite from one of the many popular food vendors. From turkey legs to fruit kabobs drizzled in chocolate to classic Filipino dishes, the food scene is a draw in and of itself.

Wawa Welcome America July 4th Fireworks

Boasting 50 free events in celebration of America’s birthday, Philadelphia’s 4th of July celebration doesn’t mess around.

Museum lovers will appreciate the pay-what-you-wish admission to some of the city’s most popular museums, and attractions such as the National Museum of American Jewish History, and music lovers won’t want to miss a second of the (free!) outdoor concerts.

The main events are, of course, the fireworks displays — and, yes, that is displays, plural. Catch the first show over the Delaware River waterfront and the second above the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This year’s second show is said to have “all-new special effects.”

Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular

Fireworks and the Boston Pops — what a combo!

Rick Friedman/Corbis News/Getty Images

Each year on July 4, the famed Boston Pops Orchestra puts on a patriotic music and fireworks show that sets the standard for the United States. This beloved event is free, and gates open three hours before the show.

If you’re a fan of singer and dancer Rita Moreno, then this year should be a special treat. The “West Side Story” star is making a special appearance, along with the Indigo Girls, Rhiannon Giddons, Natalie Cortez and Rachel Platten.

If you can’t make the July 4 show or just want to attend something less packed, there’s a concert minus the fireworks on July 3.

The Hot Dog Eating Contest

Last year’s winners of Nathan’s hot dog eating contest, men’s champion Joey Chestnut and women’s champion Miki Sudo, ate 72 and 41 hot dogs, respectively. It was Chesnut’s 10th Mustard Belt; will this year make it 11?

If you can’t physically get yourself to the corner of Surf Avenue and Stillwell in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, you can still watch the eating competition by tuning into ESPN for its live coverage of this determinedly patriotic event.

Legend has it that in 1916 four friends made a friendly wager on which of them was the most patriotic. They decided the winner would be the man who consumed the most hot dogs. Today, it lives on and is an Independence Day highlight for eating contest spectators and wannabe contestants.

AJC Peachtree Road Race

The AJC Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta, Georgia.

Shutterstock

Looking to jump start this most patriotic of holidays with a heart-rate boost? First run in 1970 with a total of 110 finishers, the AJC Road Race — a 10K — has grown exponentially. The finish-line swag may contribute to the race’s popularity; Jay Holder, director of marketing for the Atlanta Track Club, says that the shirt is indeed “noteworthy.”

Every year, hundreds of local artists submit their designs, and the public chooses from the top five contenders.

“The winning design is a closely guarded secret only revealed on race day when the first runners cross.” It’s an exciting event for both runners and spectators and may help justify any lack of restraint demonstrated at any post-race barbecue you’ll be attending. Hey, it takes energy to cheer from the sidelines.

Some bonus places

CNN’s Forrest Brown contributed to this article.

Nothing matters more to Democratic voters than picking a nominee with the best chance of beating President Donald Trump, who many party activists consider an existential threat to their values and priorities. But the question of which Democrat is most “electable” against Trump looks murkier and more contested than ever after last week’s debates.

Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts gained new fans with their forceful debate performances, and surged to second and third place behind Biden in the new CNN survey, released Monday. But they also immediately faced questions about whether their embrace of unabashedly liberal positions during the sessions — in particular, banning private health insurance, though Harris, as she’s done before, rhetorically obscured her position in the aftermath — had made them less competitive in a general election.

Such whipsawed emotions have become common among Democratic voters as they search for a nominee best suited to beat Trump. Many Democrats have found themselves not only assessing whether a candidate appeals to them personally but also trying to gauge whether the candidate will appeal to other people — Midwestern blue-collar white men who backed Trump, for instance, or young African-Americans who sat out 2016.

In effect, polls and focus groups suggest that many Democrats are approaching the field not only as voters looking to be inspired but also as political consultants looking to be convinced a candidate can win. The problem is that even many of the party’s sharpest political minds aren’t yet sure which candidate — or even whether a more liberal or centrist strategy — has the best chance of ousting Trump.

Voters who are trying to think like James Carville, the renowned campaign manager for Bill Clinton in 1992, might be reassured that he’s as uncertain as they are about which contender is the most electable.

“It’s very difficult,” he said in an interview. “As we say in New Orleans, put me in that number. What you want to see is political skill … someone who can communicate a message in an effective way, and we don’t know who that person is yet.”

Cracks in the Biden foundation

So far, polling shows that Biden has benefited the most from the focus on electability. In a national mid-June
Monmouth University poll, Biden significantly led the field when likely Democratic primary voters were asked to rank each candidate’s chance, on a 1-10 scale, of beating Trump. Fifty-nine percent of Democratic voters ranked Biden’s chance of beating Trump in the three highest categories on that scale (8 or above).

No one else finished that close: 39% ranked Sanders in the top three categories, 32% Warren, 24% Harris and just 17% South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg. As usual in this year’s polls of Democratic voters, Biden’s advantage on electability in that survey was especially pronounced with older voters.

But in last week’s debate Biden delivered a performance almost universally regarded as unsteady, when he was challenged most forcefully by
Harris on his record on school busing during the 1970s but also by Sen. Michael Bennet on the deal he cut in 2012 with Republican Mitch McConnell during the “fiscal cliff” triggered by the expiration of the tax cuts that passed under President George W. Bush.

In the new CNN poll, 43% of Democrats picked Biden as the candidate most likely to beat Trump, a strong but not overwhelming result. More impressively, Biden still led among those who had watched the debates. He even led Harris among nonwhite Democrats on that question by more than 6 to 1. But other results showed a crack in his foundation: Among the three-fifths of Democrats in the poll who said they were most focused on finding a nominee who could beat Trump, Biden led only narrowly in the horse race, drawing 23%, compared with 18% for both Harris and Warren.

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For Harris’ camp in particular, the encounter with Biden represented what some advisers viewed as the opportunity to shift the basis for how voters judge electability. Biden, other Democratic campaigns acknowledge, has benefited from the “poll test”-i.e., surveys that have shown him running better against Trump than the other Democrats. By confronting Biden so firmly, Harris hoped to shift the measurement toward an “eyeball test”: encouraging Democrats to imagine which candidate could best stand beside Trump on a debate stage in fall 2020.

In that sense, the encounter with Biden offered Harris a double benefit: It not only showcased her formidable debating skills, but also demonstrated weakness in Biden. A wide array of Democratic observers instantly concurred that Harris had propelled herself back into the top tier of candidates — a conclusion reinforced, at least for now, by the CNN survey.

From the other direction, longtime Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, who conducted focus groups around the debates for the liberal activist organization Women’s Voices, Women’s Vote, predicted from those sessions that Harris could face resistance among African American voters who conflate an attack on Biden with a challenge to Barack Obama’s legacy.

“Assuming Biden is able to get his act together, he has a real base (among African Americans), I believe, grounded in historical dynamics that make it very hard for Harris to make further gains,” Greenberg said. “At some point Biden is going to push back, maybe using the President (Obama), by saying ‘I’m carrying on his legacy.’ ”

As they assess these contrasting considerations, Democrats find themselves second-guessing their choices from day to day, if not hour to hour.

Early during last week’s second night of the presidential debate, I received an excited text from an active Democrat in California. “Kamala for President!” the Democrat wrote. “Harris v. Trump would be Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs.”

The next morning a second text came through. “She won the first debate. She dealt a significant blow to Biden … but did she win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and other swing states? It didn’t take long for anxiety to set in.”

2 vastly different strategies

Beneath these fluctuating assessments of each individual candidate’s skills, Democrats are wrestling with a more basic choice about the best pathway back to the White House.

As the debates demonstrated, the Democratic candidates are now offering two fundamentally different approaches to beating Trump, with variations on each side of the divide.

One group of candidates is stressing the importance of controlling the center of the electorate and winning center-right independents and soft Trump supporters who may have grown disillusioned more with the turmoil than the policy choices of his presidency. To Carville, who leans mostly toward this camp, Trump has provided Democrats a great opportunity to not only win but “win big” because he has failed to expand his base beyond the roughly 45% of voters who backed him in 2016 and Republican House candidates in 2018.

But Carville worries that the Democratic race, with its growing emphasis on policies that appeal to the party’s liberal vanguard, is focusing too narrowly to reach the broad audience that may be available against Trump.

“I think that the country does not want to reelect Trump, and my great worry is Democrats can talk them out of that,” he says. “We are pushing ourselves to a place that’s dangerous when we get to the general election.”

All the candidates who primarily stress the importance of holding swing voters are white. That group is led by Biden, but also includes former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Bennet, and the long-shot options of Rep. John Delaney of Maryland and Montana Gov. Steve Bullock.

That underscores the extent to which the conversation about recapturing swing voters is actually a discussion about how Democrats can improve their performance among white voters, both the ones without a college education who provided Trump’s base in 2016 and the college-educated ones whose recoil from Trump helped fuel the Democratic gains last year.

The competing argument stresses the importance of picking a nominee who can maximize turnout among young people and minorities who loathe Trump but are less likely to vote.

“If you have candidates advocating for a visionary agenda, that’s what is more electable,” says Neil Sroka, communications director for the liberal group Democracy for America. “We know that if we are going to beat Donald Trump we need to bring millions of people to the polls that didn’t vote in the 2016 election, and the way to do that is by having candidates who put forward a bold agenda and has a compelling personal story that brings them there.”

Even this camp that focuses on mobilization contains two branches. Sanders and Warren envision energizing this turnout surge with a sweeping progressive agenda centered on a government-run single-payer health care system, free public college and big tax increases on the wealthy.

Peering at the tea leaves

Another group of mobilization-focused candidates are offering a somewhat more restrained agenda and betting on energizing new voters because they embody demographic and generational change. Those contenders include Harris and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Buttigieg, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro and the long-shot younger House members in the field, including Seth Moulton of Massachusetts and Eric Swalwell of California.

The lines between these approaches are not inviolate. Harris edges close to Warren and Sanders in the leftward lean and ambition of her agenda; Buttigieg, though a powerful symbol of change as a gay millennial candidate, tilts more toward the centrists than the progressives in his agenda and demeanor. And every candidate hopes, at least to some extent, to both mobilize nonvoters and persuade swing voters.

“Real elections evolve,” Greenberg said. “You are at a point in the race where people are carving out their space early in the process, with a lot of candidates … but I wouldn’t assume those strategies don’t become blended as you move toward the election, after you’ve established your early wins and are running more broadly. I wouldn’t assume that this is where they end.”

But there’s no question that candidates put differing emphases on the two sides of that equation. If the party picks Biden or Klobuchar as the nominee, for instance, that would represent a greater bet on recapturing swing voters than picking Harris or Warren, who might be more successful at mobilizing nonvoters.

“The bigger thing is nobody really knows what’s electable or not,” Sroka said. “Electability is this notion we know what voters want. One of the silver linings of 2016 is people are finally starting to understand that politics and political change are not linear, and that things that are very surprising happen all the time. … By any measure, Donald Trump should have not won the 2016 election, but he did, and I think that is forcing many people to change their mind about what is electable and what isn’t.”

The prosecution, the defense and the judge told jurors court Monday that some witnesses had lied on the stand. It will be up to them to decide who they believe.

The prosecution’s final say on the case

Commander Jeff Pietrzyk said Gallagher’s words, photos and testimony from fellow SEALS proved that he intentionally caused the death of a wounded young ISIS prisoner.

“The death of the ISIS detainee is a result of stabbing because Gallagher said so,” Pietrzyk said.

Former Navy SEAL Dylan Dille told jurors that Gallagher posed for individual and group photos with the prisoner’s body.

A few weeks after they returned to the United States, Dille said Gallagher pulled him aside and told him, “I know you guys are talking about what happened. If you stop talking about it, then I’ll stop talking about it.”

Pietrzyk acknowledged that the victim was not a sympathetic figure. But the victim was in the care of US servicemen and receiving medical aid, Pietrzyk said.

He was “no longer a lawful target,” Pietrzyk said.

ISIS might have done worse to its captives, Pietrzyk said, but “we are not ISIS.”

The defense argument

The defense did not dispute that Gallagher texted the photo.

Lead attorney Tim Parlatore chalked it up to dark humor and said it did not prove that Gallagher committed murder.

Holes in the investigation, including “no body, no autopsy, no forensics,” meant the prosecution had no case, he said.

“We shouldn’t even be here, this case should have been dismissed.”

Witnesses who testified against Gallagher “put mutiny above the truth,” Parlatore said.

Dille also testified that during a sniper mission, he saw Gallagher shoot at civilians, including an elderly man and two women in hijabs.

Dalton Tolbert, another witness, said he fired a warning shot at an old man during a sniper mission with Gallagher. The man ran away, Tolbert said, but fell after another sniper fired.

A third witness said he heard shots fired from Gallagher’s position during another sniper mission. Joshua Vriens said he saw four girls who looked to be between the ages of 12 and 14. After the shot, one girl clutched her stomach and fell down.

All three admitted on cross-examination they did not actually see Gallagher fire the shot.

The defense team called eight witnesses, two of whom disputed that Gallagher stabbed the detainee.

One of them, Staff Sgt. Giorgio Kirylo, testified that he did not see stab wounds on the ISIS detainee’s neck.

Kirylo testified he moved the body, after medical efforts failed, to take a “trophy photo.”

The group wanted to take the photo because “everyone was happy about the day” and the success of the mission, Kirylo said. Kirylo called Miller, who said he witnessed the stabbing, a liar.

Another defense witness, Special Operations Master Chief Brian Alazzawi, said no one ever complained about Gallagher shooting at civilians or stabbing a prisoner while on deployment.

The SEAL who changed his story

Special Operator First Class Corey Scott said that while he’d seen Gallagher stab the prisoner, he was the one who “suffocated” him.

Scott, a SEAL medic, said the prisoner was “unconscious but breathing normally with a wound on his leg when Scott came upon the the scene.

Gallagher and another medic were already there, and someone had performed a tracheotomy — an incision in the neck to open an airway — on the prisoner, and a tube was in his neck.

After the other medic left the scene, Scott said he saw “Gallagher pull out his knife and stab the ISIS prisoner underneath the collar bone at least once.” He said he did not see any blood. Scott froze and was not sure what to do and said he “stayed with the prisoner until he asphyxiated.”

On cross-examination, he told the defense that he never saw any blood after the stabbing. That’s when he admitted to killing the prisoner himself, suggesting it was an act of mercy because he was concerned the boy — a prisoner of the Iraqi forces — would be tortured by the Iraqis.

Scott, who testified under immunity, did not admit to killing the prisoner in previous interviews with investigators and prosecutors. He said he was only doing so now because he was granted immunity, which means he cannot be prosecuted for his testimony.

He also said he does not want to see Gallagher prosecuted and he does not want to see him go to jail.

In the prosecution’s rebuttal closing argument, Lt. Scott McDonald said Gallagher’s fate was not up to Scott.

“That’s not for him to decide.”

The qualification requirements are about to get significantly tougher for making the debate stage. Instead of needing 1% in three qualifying polls to make the September debate (as in the June and July debate), candidates will need 2% in 4 qualifying polls released between June 28 and August 28.

Our CNN poll is the first poll candidates can use to qualify for the debate. As previously discussed, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren all got at least 4% in our poll.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, (3%) Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (2%) and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke (3%) all also got to that 2% threshold.

No other candidate managed to reach that point.

Indeed our poll points to the trouble that a lot of candidates may have getting 2%. There were an additional four candidates (former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and businessman Andrew Yang) who got 1%. Beyond that, no one could even reach 1%.

It’s one thing to get 1% by chance even when you don’t have 1% of the Democratic primary electorate supporting you.

It’s another thing entirely to get to 2% by chance alone.

Additionally, candidates will have only two months to reach that 2%. They’ll need to do it four times.

Unless something changes, the number of debaters will be shrink dramatically.

But there are limits to ordinary people’s willingness to continue to march for a cause which, in effect, they’ve already won. Lam has suspended the bill, which will end when the city’s legislature’s current term finished at the end of the month.

The pragmatism, or conservatism, of those people stands in stark contrast to the attitude of the mainly college-age protesters who have taken to the streets regularly throughout June.

These young protesters have been invigorated by the partial victories they have scored in the extradition bill clashes, and infuriated at the behavior of police and attitude of the government and pro-Beijing lawmakers.

Even full capitulation to the original demands of the anti-extradition marches is unlikely to send them home, especially given that schools and universities are on summer break.

On Monday, this became evident when thousands of young people gathered outside the city government headquarters resulting in a tense stand off with riot police, hours before the official march was due to begin.

The apparent splintering of the protest movement could be a sign of the divisions emerging within Hong Kong society.

More protests to come

Some of these protesters — who range in age from mid-to-late teens to early twenties — took part in the 2014 Umbrella Movement, which called for universal suffrage in Hong Kong and share many of its pro-democracy goals.

But the past month’s events also represent an escalation and evolution of that movement.

The protesters have learned not to establish fixed camps, which can be systematically cleared by police, and after more than four years of prosecutions they are careful about hiding their identities, wearing masks on the streets and communicating via encrypted messaging apps.

The 2014 protests were — after a night of tear gas and pepper spray — characterized by peacefulness and idealism, and marked perhaps the last time Hong Kongers thought their government might deliver on promises made years ago to further democratize.

Today’s protesters have no such hopes, they are fighting to force the government to act, on the grounds that if they don’t, the future is destined to be bleak.

For many, the future is already bleak. The divide between rich and poor continues to grow and house prices and cost of living is putting a middle class life out of reach for many of the city’s young.

“Die for Hong Kong,” some protesters could be heard shouting in the violent clashes on June 12.

And while others would not go so far, all were willing to risk arrest and injury.

Blue vs yellow

Hong Kong has never had full democracy. It was a British colony ruled first from afar and then by a semi-democratic system stacked in favor of the government, which was what Beijing inherited when it took control in 1997.

While democracy and greater accountability would undoubtedly help fix many of the problems that Hong Kong suffers from, not least a government which places the needs of property developers over those without housing, Beijing showed five years ago that this was not something it would consider.

For Hong Kong’s silent middle, this is something that may be unfortunate but ultimately has to be accepted. They may come out to protect existing rights, but there’s only so far they are willing to rock the boat when it comes to fighting for what many think of as a lost cause.

The more forceful edge of this conservatism was out in force on Sunday. Thousands of pro-government demonstrators turned out for a rally in support of the city’s police — who have had their headquarters repeatedly besieged by egg-throwing protesters since the clashes of June 12 — and calls for a clampdown on anti-government activity.

Ironically for a pro-law and order event, these protesters were filmed hurling abuse and missiles at counter demonstrators, harassing journalists, and attempting to break into the city’s legislature.

But the scenes were reminiscent of 2014, when so-called blue ribboners (the color of the police) clashed with the pro-democracy protesters in the streets and called for draconian laws to crack down on them.

Beijing’s hand was widely perceived to be involved in that anti-Umbrella Movement reaction, but even if it was, it was not without local support.

The divide between blue ribboners and pro-democracy yellow ribboners had not gone away after 2014, but it had receded into the background as Lam at least at first delivered on some of her promises to restore calm.

Lam may have been the one to force open that divide once again, but the risk for the yellow ribboners in the streets Monday is that, as Hong Kong’s summer of discontent becomes a summer of rage, it is them, not Lam who get blamed for prolonging the chaos.

They’ve been overshadowed by the chaos at the government headquarters this evening, but an estimated 550,000 people took part in the peaceful pro-democracy march today.

That figure comes from the organizers of the July 1 march, the Civil Human Rights Front.

It marks a huge surge in year-on-year attendance, and is more than 10 times the 50,000 people estimated to have marched on July 1, 2018.

Police, however, said an estimated 190,000 people took part in today’s march.

Images from the protest showed young and old people marching side-by-side. Some parents even brought along their young children.

Among the chants used by protesters were “(Chief Executive) Carrie Lam, step down!” and “Free Hong Kong.”

July 1 was always likely to be a day of heavy protests in Hong Kong.

After weeks of controversy around the China extradition bill and accusations of police brutality, both organizers and police were expecting large turnouts on the anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to China.

But clashes between black-clad protesters and armored police, involving barricades and pepper spray, are a clear indication of two sides on the edge.

The last major citywide protest on June 16 was reasonably calm. Few police were sighted and families with children joined in the march, which organizers said reached up to two million people.

What to expect today: This afternoon’s demonstration could have a very different tone.

One early indication will be whether there is a heavy police presence or if families feel safe coming out to the march, which is taking place on a public holiday in Hong Kong.

Antagonistic actions by either side could rapidly push the situation into a very bad place.