GLEICHSCHALTUNG: Even Sports Media Is Getting in on the Whitewashing of Tim Walz.

HMM: FDA rejects MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

WRECKAGE ENSUED: Ten years ago Michael Brown died, and Black Lives Matter, based on the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie, was born.

BILL WHITTLE: How to beat Harris, Part 1: ‘Equity.’

More to come.

EVERY TIME I FEAR THAT THE DEMOCRATS’ ELECTION FORTIFICATIONS IN PLACES LIKE PENNSYLVANIA, MICHIGAN, AND WISCONSIN HAVE BECOME IMPENETRABLE, I SEE A BACK-FLIPPING PANDER LIKE THIS ONE:

Kamala Harris — who recently copied President Trump’s “no tax on tips” campaign promise — voted in 2022 to pass legislation that allowed the IRS to track down workers’ tips so that they could be taxed. pic.twitter.com/n52u7PvTLS

— Alana Mastrangelo (@ARmastrangelo) August 12, 2024

The only thing Harris-Walz seems to feel comfortable about is the media running cover for them — which could prove to be enough, of course.

JON GABRIEL: Keeping the Faith: In our current hypersecular era, we seem to have forgotten that religion has a place in the public square.

JAMES LILEKS: Why is this column like deep-dish pizza? You can stick a fork in both.

For my last column at the [Minneapolis] Star Tribune, I am going to be as self-indulgent as the medium permits. Consider this the equivalent of a condemned man’s request for a last meal.

Speaking of which, what would you choose for yours?

Sometimes I think I’d go for deep-dish pizza, if only for the argument I could have with the prison official who walked me down the last mile. “That wasn’t pizza,” he’d say. “That’s more of a casserole.”

“No, it has the elements of pizza, just in an exaggerated form.” I’d turn to the priest walking alongside. “Father, back me up here.”

Read the whole thing.

NEW ELECTRIC LADY STUDIOS DOCUMENTARY HIGHLIGHTS JIMI HENDRIX’S BRILLIANT MANHATTAN RECORDING STUDIO: My latest, over at Ed Driscoll.com.

“I’M NOT GONNA BE IGNORED, DAN!” Has the Media Finally Had Enough of Kamala Harris’s Silent Treatment? “There is, however, a dance that must be performed for the public between Democrats and their enablers in the mainstream media. The media pretends to ask tough questions and Democrat candidates pretend to answer them. The problem is that Harris isn’t playing her part in the dance — and the press is starting to pipe up a bit in frustration.”

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Oooof.

They have Karl red-handed here. https://t.co/T0kGexUknm

— Sunny (@sunnyright) August 12, 2024

Jim Geraghty writes, “The Media Have Forgotten Why They Exist,” that “Large swaths of the national media believe that their job, at this moment, is to tell you how awesome the presidential and vice-presidential candidates are, instead of pointing out their records and policies. (In the case of Kamala Harris, all we have are her policy stances from her 2020 campaign and the current Biden administration policies, even though her campaign staff insists those positions from 2019 are no longer operative.)”

To be fair, they’ve “forgotten why they exist” since 2008, and arguably, since 2004:

Vance knows this, and he deserves a lot of credit for going into the lion’s den and letting them expose themselves for what they are.

THIS IS THE WAY:

JD Vance: “You've now asked me three questions about comments that I made three years ago. I wonder what Kamala Harris thinks about the fact that her policies opened the southern border."

Dana Bash: "Im interviewing you not Kamala Harris."

JD Vance: "You're interviewing me… pic.twitter.com/4BI1v3LkMz

— Real Mac Report (@RealMacReport) August 11, 2024

Vance is a master class on how to handle the hostile media.

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

DAVID SOLWAY: Islam and the Future of the West.

In End of the World: Civilization and Its Fate, philosopher Jon Mills reflects on the Taliban attack with machine guns and explosives on a school in Peshawar, in which 132 schoolchildren were slaughtered. The act is almost incomprehensible. “The immediate dislocation of understanding any rational means behind such atrocities,” he writes “is emotionally unfathomable for the simple fact that it disrupts our psychic need for a moral order in the universe.” It represents a “pathological breach” in our implicit conviction that we live in a civilized world. “It takes only one act of barbarism,” he concludes, “to remind us that evil is no illusion.” Of course, the single act of barbarism can be and is multiplied exponentially all over the world every moment of the day, but there exists one world-historical belief system in which such occasions are both justified and mandated.

Any reading of the Koran, as Robert Spencer, Raymond Ibrahim, Ali Sina, Ibn Warrak, Rebecca Bynum, and a host of other excellent scholars make abundantly clear, will reveal ayah after ayah commanding acts of grotesque violence against unbelievers. The reward for the martyrs who have been slain in service to Allah will be peace, loveliness, and virgins with pear-shaped breasts, as stipulated variously in Sura 44:45-55 and 78:31-36 of the Koran.

The Taliban killers said they were justified in committing so feral and heinous an act as payback for the harms they themselves had unjustifiably endured. What we are witnessing, however, is an expression of what Mills calls the “ethics of evil,” which is nothing less than “the justification of self-righteousness while perpetrating evil under the guise of moral superiority.”

Read the whole thing.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST THE WASHINGTON POST…: Questions we’d love to ask Kamala Harris.

If she hopes to prevail, Ms. Harris needs to present her ideas. The media and public have legitimate questions, and she should face them. This is a political necessity — Mr. Trump is already turning her avoidance of the media into an attack line. And elections aren’t just about winning. They’re about accumulating political capital for a particular agenda, which Ms. Harris can’t do unless she articulates one.

What’s more, Ms. Harris might find her best hope of persuading voters is not to reinforce familiar negative information about Mr. Trump, even if it’s repackaged as an attack on his, and his party’s, “weirdness.” Rather, a new survey published in Matt Yglesias’s newsletter by political scientists David Broockman of the University of California at Berkeley and Josh Kalla of Yale, who study political messaging, suggests that her best bet would be to provide the public new, positive information about herself — and her agenda.
…
Without hearing Ms. Harris articulate her thought process, she runs the risk of leaving voters to wonder whether she is just shifting with the political winds, or, indeed, planning to revert to previous positions after she’s won the presidency. Why, for instance, did she embrace Mr. Trump’s idea to exempt tips from taxation?

Would the Washington Post actually ask their questions, even on the off chance Harris deigned to sit for a real interview?

MORE PREDICTABLE NONSENSE FROM LEFTY ACADEMICS: New president of American Assn. of University Professors: J.D. Vance is ‘fascist.’ He’s “a Rutgers University anthropologist whose research ‘is a mixture of traditional and cyber-based ethnography.'”

Flashback: Why the left keeps smearing its political rivals as Hitlers or Mussolinis.

PUTIN’S EMBARRASSMENT: What the Hell Is Going on in Kursk? “If Kyiv wanted a propaganda win, showing that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin can’t fully protect the Motherland, then they got one.”

THAT’S BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG: Federal judges who refused to hire Columbia grads are cleared of misconduct charges: ‘As judges who hire law clerks every year to serve in the federal judiciary, we have lost confidence in Columbia as an institution of higher education. Columbia has instead become an incubator of bigotry,’ they wrote. Well, yes.

AMERICAN EX-PAT CHARGED IN GERMAN COURT FOR CRITICIZING MASK MANDATE: Playwright & novelist C. J. Hopkins was charged with “promoting the tenets of National Socialism” simply for referencing the cover of his book (which depicts a swastika-branded medical mask) in a tweet calling masks “ideological conformity symbols.”

ELECTRIC STICKER SHOCK: Tesla halts orders for $61,000 Cybertruck, cheapest version now $100,000.

Tesla stopped taking orders for the cheapest model of its Cybertruck electric pickup, which was priced at $61,000. Now, its $100,000 version is the cheapest model available for order on the automaker’s website.

Consumers and investors have closely monitored the supply and demand of Tesla’s Cybertruck after CEO Elon Musk invested heavily in the EV truck line in recent years with the goal of producing 200,000 annually.

Musk said last fall that Tesla had 1 million reservations for the truck. Some customers have indicated they’re waiting for less expensive versions to be available because its prices have been higher and driving ranges lower than originally forecast.

Plus:

Guidehouse Insights analyst Sam Abuelsamid told Reuters that Tesla’s move “shows that demand is a lot less than a million trucks” and added, “They’re sitting on a lot of inventory of two-motor and three-motor trucks right now.”

The mass market for electric trucks isn’t very massive.

LIMITED TIME DEAL: Waterpik Cordless Pulse Rechargeable Portable Water Flosser. #CommissionEarned

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Hamas-Loving Harris Is Working Hard for the Dearborn Vote. “Harris gets away with being all over the place like that because the MSM hacks are protecting her, of course. They’ll keep up the ‘YAS QUEEN!’ incurious nonsense for as long as possible. She may end up staking out positions on both sides of every hot-button issue except abortion by the time someone finally gets around to interviewing her.”

DON SURBER: The Media Support Censorship.

ROGER SIMON: ‘Elite Capture,’ Tim Walz and How I Met Deng Xiaoping.

IT’S NOT ONLY KAMALA WHO WON’T ENGAGE: Sunday Show lineup: “That’s a lot of Vance, and there was no one from the Democratic side of the presidential campaign. For the Democrats, there were only 2 Senators (Klobuchar & Sanders), the Governor of Kansas, the Transportation Secretary, and a member of the House of Representatives. Why can’t we hear from the Democratic campaign? They’re still putting their ideas together and ironing out past inconsistencies? Are they in no shape to face serious questions? Or do they simply see that they’re doing awfully well running on ‘joy’ and not-Biden-not-Trumpness so there’s no reason to change.”

Certainly no reason in terms of media scrutiny.

THEY’RE AFRAID OF WHAT WILL COME OUT IF THEY’RE NOT IN CHARGE: David Strom: The Establishment Are Fighting Like Cornered Rats.

Related:

I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t hv all this technology, nor early voting, but could get it done in an evening? https://t.co/8k1ME6VyNc

— Elizabeth Scalia (@TheAnchoress) August 12, 2024