RIDIN’ WITH BIDEN:

The Democrats’ ridin’ with Biden seems to me an optimal scenario for President Trump. Can Biden maintain the Democrats’ unhappy status quo? “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future,” but I doubt it.

They also serve who only stand and wait. The press stands and waits to jump into bed with Kamala, metaphorically speaking. That is one message I take from the — ah, somewhat late — awakening of CNN’s Jake Tapper in the brutal clip below. Along with the rest of the mainstream media, he’s trying to maintain his self-respect.

This is it. The search is over.

Behold: The greatest CNN segment in history.pic.twitter.com/Zyx76IYz0G

— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) July 9, 2024

Which is so odd — in mid-June, CNN was still acting as a party operatives with bylines pushing the “cheap fakes” and “deceptive editing” White House talking points whenever video emerged of the (p)resident acting just as we’ve seen during the debate and afterward.

Or as Oliver Wiseman writes at the Free Press: How ‘Misinformation’ Becomes Common Knowledge: “Every White House reporter, every fancy magazine profiler, they knew exactly what was going on with Joe Biden. They just didn’t think you, the reader, were ready to know. Also, did we mention the risk of getting yelled at by an intern? That’s hard. The Biden era has to be one of the least covered White Houses in modern history. Read the mainstream press, and you’d think Trump had been president these last four years.”

HE ONLY SOMETIMES COSPLAYS AS BASED AND THIS BIT OF WOKENESS WAS JUST SICK: Welp. John Fetterman Is Back on the Dark Side.

I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Biden’s Riding the Bomb All the Way Down.

ILYA SHAPIRO: Wrapping Up the Supreme Court Term: Statistics and themes on the term that was, and a brief glimpse at the future.

DISCRIMINATION: Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?

Higher education is rendering itself irrelevant and sectarian, and will then complain that the inevitable loss of public support stems from “anti-intellectualism.” But there is nothing intellectual about organizations that are organized around the promotion of political dogma. Or about people who are so organized.

READER FAVORITE: 5-Minute Core Exercises for Seniors: Daily Routines to Build Balance and Boost Confidence. #CommissionEarned

YES: Why boys don’t read very much: They want manly courage — not teen angst.

Boys read a lot less than girls, because assigned reading is oriented toward girls’ tastes, writes Tom Sarrouf on the Institute for Family Studies. Boys are “more interested in war, comedy, sports, and science fiction, and more excited about informational texts,” while girls prefer narratives and romances. “Boys are also far less likely to read books by female authors or with female protagonist, but girls were willing to read books written by men and with male protagonists.”

Boys get enough exposure to nonfiction, writes Katya Sedgewick on American Mind. They need to read classic literature with male heroes. (According to the 2024 What Kids Are Reading report, Diary of a Wimpy Kid is on reading lists from elementary to high school, she writes. Not good enough.)

Sedgewick grew up in the Soviet Union reading Twain, Dumas and Tolstoy. She makes a case for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a “rebel child living by wits and daring.” (I loved Tom Sawyer as a kid.) “I find it strange that teachers don’t see it as their job to connect the next generation of Americans to their heritage, preferring to submerge students into the sea of forgettable contemporary titles rather than explaining complicated language and showing their students how to love historic writing.”

As a high school English teacher and father of young readers, Auguste Meyrat thinks boys need more books with “action, conflict and even violence” and fewer books focused on “feelings and relationships.”

Boys aren’t girls.

MAKE POLITICS FUN AGAIN! Trump challenges Biden to $1 million charity golf tournament.

Say what you will about Trump, he tries to make it so things aren’t so boring and serious all the time. I mean, this is a guy who not only believes in “NO TAX ON TIPS!” (and don’t we all? Can we please give the Chili’s waiter a break already?) but has it in his official agenda. In all caps.

UPDATE: Biden said no in the most anti-fun way possible. (Maybe he shouldn’t have issued the original challenge?)

SPEAKING OF “DON’T GET COCKY:” Biden support slips in deep blue New York: ‘We’re a battleground state now.’

President Joe Biden has a new problem: a competitive race in deep blue New York.

Elected officials, union leaders and political consultants are panicking over polls showing a steady erosion of Biden’s support in a state he won by 23 points four years ago. They’re so worried they’ve been trying to convince the Biden team to pour resources into New York to shore up his campaign and boost Democrats running in a half-dozen swing districts that could determine control of the House.

Biden aides have not focused on New York, committing no significant resources to a state where they expect the president to easily win all 28 electoral college votes in November.

But the warning signs are impossible to ignore and have been building over the past year. Two private polls conducted in a swing New York House district and reviewed by POLITICO — one in September and another in March — found former President Donald Trump leading Biden there by 1 point, a virtual tie. And public polls over the last four months found Biden’s lead had winnowed to just 8 points across New York — an unusually narrow gap in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.

“We’re still acting like this is a one-party state, which for pretty much 20, 25 years it has been,” Democratic Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said. “I truly believe we’re a battleground state now.”

I’d honestly be shocked if Biden goes on to actually lose New York, but as former Democratic New York Gov. David Paterson tells the Politico, “The money that needs to be spent here will be subtracted from other areas he’s going to lose.”

DON’T GET COCKY:

Today, we're making six changes to our Electoral College Ratings.

AZ: Toss Up to Lean R
GA: Toss Up to Lean R
MN: Likely D to Lean D#NE02: Likely D to Lean D
NH: Likely D to Lean D
NV: Toss Up to Lean R@amyewalter on the state of the race post-debate: https://t.co/AAoW23wKWC

— Cook Political Report (@CookPolitical) July 9, 2024

More: “President Biden was narrowly trailing Donald Trump ahead of the June 27 debate. That gap has grown slightly larger since then. Given our closely-divided electorate, even a seemingly small two-point shift is significant.”

THREE JUNK SCIENCE ‘TELLS:’ Capital Research Center’s (CRC) Jon Rodeback points to three words whose presence in a news story is all-but-certain warning sign of “junk science” in the service of political ideology.

I ALWAYS ASSUME AT THE OUTSET THAT THESE SCANDALS ARE LIKELY HOAXES, AND I’M SELDOM WRONG: Ole Miss NAACP won’t share evidence two students made ‘racist remarks’ at rally.

“DARTH SIDIOUS” WAS ALREADY TAKEN: Joe Accidentally Just Gave Himself a New Nickname.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? As The Percentage Of Accommodated Students In A Law School Increases, Its First-Time Bar Pass Rate Decreases.

BADGE OF HONOR: Meet the eleven police leaders sanctioned by Iran for breaking up anti-Israel encampments: The Iranian government sanctioned eleven American police leaders for “suppressing” campus anti-Israel encampments across the country.

There goes that vacation on Kharg Island.

SHOT: AI is effectively ‘useless’—and it’s created a ‘fake it till you make it’ bubble that could end in disaster, veteran market watcher warns.

Chaser: AI is quietly being used to pick your pocket.

Retailers like Amazon know so, so much about what you buy, both on its platform and off. And you have no way of knowing when your choices are changing what you pay. In 2018, it was headline news that Amazon adjusted prices 2.5 million times a day. Given Amazon’s growth and the growth of AI, the number is likely an order of magnitude higher today. For retailers like Walmart, it’s not enough to use our shopping history. In February, the retail behemoth agreed to buy the smart-TV maker Vizio for more than $2 billion, potentially giving Walmart a windfall of intimate consumer data. Smart TVs not only monitor what we watch with Orwellian precision but track other nearby devices with ultrasonic beacons, and can even listen in to what we say in the privacy of our own homes. Vizio specifically has been fined millions of dollars over allegations that it illegally spied on customers.

Not only do retailers know what you’ve bought and how much money you make, but often they know where you are, how your day is going, and what your mood is like, all of which can be neatly synthesized by AI neural networks to calculate how much you’d pay for a given item in a given moment.

I suspect there’s money to be made combating this in anonymized AI shopping front ends to sniff out the best deals.

“TEACHING SOCIOLOGY” JOURNAL IS AN IDEOLOGICAL NIGHTMARE. No surprise, sadly, but it’s “good” to have confirmation. Representative example: On climate change, “‘horrific … scenarios’ must be privileged even if they cause ‘students … [to] fall into despair,’ because ‘climate change is, in fact, an intractable existential crisis.'” Wow, thanks, “science.”

LIGHTNING DEAL: Kitchen Academy Induction Cookware Sets. #CommissionEarned

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: DOCTOR Jill Biden Has Always Been In Full Edith Wilson Mode. “If the power brokers in the Democratic National Committee really did think that Joe Biden would relinquish power and not run for a second term, they were obviously overlooking his wife. If she is feeling slighted, it’s only going to strengthen her resolve to keep her husband propped up in the Oval Office for as long as she can.”

JOHN LUCAS: “This murder of political enemies is what many unhinged Trump opponents seek. It is not a secret — they tell us this is what they want.” “This professor of linguistics, this New York Times wordsmith, presumably chooses his words carefully.”

I wouldn’t rule out a “grand insurrection” if Trump were murdered, though. Look what happened after Martin Luther King was shot. Why should we assume that Trump supporters would be more passive than the supporters of a nonviolent protest leader?

Also, I’m sad about this because John McWhorter is normally a reasonable guy who is willing to break with the Left monolith on many issues. That he’s still fantasizing about Trump being assassinated shows just how far the Trump Derangement Syndrome brain-rot has spread.

LOL:

Writing about US food the way the NYT covers Asian fruit: In a nation torn by racial conflict, one unlikely food unites. To those accustomed to chopsticks, the greasy parcel known as a 'burger', a sort of split bao, is crude and messy. Yet it encapsulates a nation's violent past.

— Soon-Tzu Speechley 孫子 (@speechleyish) June 25, 2020

WOEING: Boeing deliveries drop 27% in June year-on-year.

The company handed over five 777 freighters, including two of the jets to Air China, confirming Reuters reports that widebody deliveries to China have resumed after being halted this spring due to a Chinese regulatory review.

Boeing also reported 11 orders in June for 777 freighters, the third-highest month ever for the model, out of a total of 14 gross orders for the month.

After adjustments to reflect the backlog, Boeing reported adjusted net orders for the month of a negative 104. The planemaker did not give a specific explanation.

That brought Boeing’s gross order total so far this year to 156. After removing cancellations and conversions, Boeing posted a net total of 115 orders since the start of 2024.

Going forward doesn’t look any better: Boeing sold just three passenger jets in the past month. “It sold just three 737 Max jets, two to an unidentified customer and one to Alaska Airlines to replace the plane that had a door plug blow out on a January 5 flight as it approached 16,000 feet.”

WELL, HE HAS A BETTER RECORD: Voters, especially independents, pick Trump to ‘handle’ inflation.

IT WAS A TEST. ALL TESTS ARE SUCCESSFUL IF YOU LEARN SOMETHING. Europe’s first Ariane 6 flight achieved most of its goals, but ended prematurely.

HE DOESN’T JUST PLAY A DOCTOR ON TV: Democrat NBC Neurologist Lands a DEATH BLOW on Biden Narrative: ‘He Definitely Has It.’