On the Shapiro for VP front

“He’s Jewish,” CNN’s John King noted last week, so “there could be some risk in putting him on the ticket.”

[...]

Today, Shapiro is the only veep contender subject to an organized campaign to capsize his prospective nomination. Put together by hard-left congressional staffers and members of Democratic Socialists of America, among others, the push is ostensibly about Shapiro’s support for Israel. “Tell Kamala and the Democrats now,” reads the site NoGenocideJosh.com, “say no to Genocide Josh Shapiro for Vice President.”

  The Atlantic

Actually, naming him would alleviate two of the right's talking points against her: that she's pro-Palestinian and Trump's recent remarks that "she hates Jews." (Never mind she married one.)

[A]s its name implies, the “Genocide Josh” campaign is not about applying a single standard on Palestine to all VP contenders; it’s about applying them to one person, who just so happens to be the only Jew on the shortlist. And to make matters more absurd, Shapiro’s positions on Israel don’t come close to fitting the epithet.

“I personally believe Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the worst leaders of all time,” Shapiro told reporters in January, months before Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for the Israeli leader to resign. At the time, Shapiro also pressed for an “immediate two-state solution,” something Netanyahu and his hard-right government stridently oppose. The anti-Shapiro campaign ignores these remarks but makes much of the governor’s comparison of campus Gaza protesters to “people dressed up in KKK outfits.” When he said that in an interview, however, Shapiro was distinguishing between bigoted extremists—such as the Columbia campus-protest leader who called for killing “Zionists”—and peaceful demonstrators, about whom the governor has said, “It’s right for young people to righteously protest and question.”

Now consider the other vice-presidential contenders. Arizona’s Senator Mark Kelly leads the Democratic-nominee prediction markets along with Shapiro. Like the Pennsylvania governor, Kelly also supported using police to break up campus encampments. “Everybody has the right to protest peacefully,” he said, “but when it turns into unlawful acts—we’ve seen this in a number of colleges and universities, including here in Arizona—it’s appropriate for the police to step in.” In the same interview, Kelly said that the Israelis “have to do a better job” reducing civilian casualties in Gaza, but drew on his military experience to explain the difficulty of that task, and emphasized that “Hamas, without question, is the biggest impediment to peace in the Middle East.” Last week, Kelly attended Netanyahu’s address to Congress and applauded.

Unlike Shapiro, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper didn’t simply enforce preexisting state laws against boycotts of Israel while in office—he signed one himself in 2017. This month, Cooper codified into state law a definition of anti-Semitism that has been adopted by many countries around the world, but that left-wing critics argue penalizes speech critical of Israel. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, flew state flags at half-mast after October 7 and did not respond to activists who called on the state to divest from Israel. Some were arrested after protesting outside his residence.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 12:52 pm: