"After mostly avoiding interviews as her campaign began, the vice president will hold several this week, including with Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and the hosts of 'The View.'"

A funny subheadline at the NYT — funny because if she's just going on Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and "The View," Harris is still avoiding interviews. That those are the 3 interviews the NYT names makes it obvious.

The headline is "Harris Will Appear in a Whirlwind of Interviews, Most of Them Friendly."

Most of them? Who's the unfriendly interviewer she dares to face? I am really appalled by the timidity. She needs to prove she's strong and can stand up for us. 

I noticed that article because I went looking for Kamala Harris articles on the front page of the New York Times. You'd think she'd make more news!

There's also this Susan Faludi thing at the top of the right hand column, sitting atop a musing about celibacy:

So let's stare slack-jawed and cross-eyed at a rose. Mmmm. America's protector, eh?

Yeah, that kind of was my question about Kamala Harris when I saw that she dared to speak to Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and the hosts of "The View."

So let's see if Susan Faludi makes the case for KH as a protector. Much of that column is generic: Women have not, traditionally, been regarded as the protector. Some of it is an attack on Trump. Let's skip to something specific about Harris:

"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."

"Vance came into this debate with a mission, which was to make himself and his running mate seem more reasonable, less extreme and more respectful of women. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, and he was just really good at it. He calibrated his tone really shrewdly. Whereas, I don’t think Walz had an objective other than to answer the questions and talk a lot about Minnesota.... He didn’t seem to want to achieve any one main thing, and so he didn’t really achieve much of anything, other than to do no harm.... And I was very surprised that Walz didn’t... point to the pretty extreme things Vance has said about women. I guess he was waiting for the moderators to do it. But the first half-hour of a debate is when viewers are really locked in, and Vance has a serious vulnerability there. I think I would have made that my main objective. The phrase 'cat ladies' never even came up."

Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.

At one point, Megan McArdle talks about watching the debate with the sound off. Vance looked "much more composed." What Matt Bai noticed with the sound off was "how deeply concerned Walz looked about everything, as if he feared bad news." Which is basically the same point. McArdle asks "At a visceral level, who wants a president who looks anxious?"

I did the opposite mostly. I watched without looking at them.

"Iran fired a large barrage of missiles at Israel on Tuesday evening, an attack that could set off a sharp escalation in the long-simmering conflict...."

"Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement that the missile attack had been in retaliation for the assassinations of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and an Iranian commander. The statement said Iran would launch more missiles if Iran were attacked.... Loud booming explosions were heard above Tel Aviv, and flashes of light from the arcing intercepting rockets of Israel’s air defense system were visible. The salvo of missiles from Iran came a day after Israeli forces began a rare ground invasion of southern Lebanon aimed at crippling the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah there.... A senior White House official said the United States would help defend Israel and warned that a direct attack against Israel 'will carry severe consequences for Iran.'... President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris... reviewed plans to help Israel defend against the attacks and protect Americans in the region."

The NYT reports.

"Well, Kamala Harris, of course, hasn't had a lot of experience in foreign policy, but she's learned a lot at the side of President Biden as his vice president."

"So we're sort of guessing a little bit about her vision and her views. I think our general assumption is that she's pretty close to where Biden is, and I think it's safe to assume that she is basically a pretty conventional center left Democratic, foreign-policy thinker. I mean, to the extent that she brings her own individual perspective, it probably comes from her time as a prosecutor and a lawyer that she believes in the international rules-based order. So she looks at foreign policy in the sense of who is following the rules, in effect, in terms of whether it be trade security or economics."

Said Peter Baker on "Alliance vs. Isolation: Harris and Trump’s Competing Views on Foreign Policy," today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast (transcript and audio at that link)(I've tweaked some punctuation, etc.).

How are we to understand Harris as anything other than a continuation of Biden? That's what Peter Baker is doing.

And here's how he contrasts Trump: