“So, you didn’t say, ‘This bandage was a prop, a spectacle from a candidate who’s obsessed with spectacles’?” asked Lewandowski.
“Uh, Mr. Lewandowski, I did not say that. That is a false quote,” the MSNBC host shot back.
“I have it right here,” said Lewandowski.
“What you have is a false quote… I’m putting you on notice, if you continue to repeat falsely that I said that, you will be potentially in a defamation situation because I didn’t say that,” [Ari] Melber threatened, declining Lewandowski’s offer to apologize to former President Trump for his remarks.
The far-left Daily Beast, Mediaite, and Huffington Post covered the exchange in tones suggesting Melber was in the right. However, their reports show that Lewandowski’s characterization of Melber’s statement about Trump and his bandage is correct.
Users on X began quoting Melber’s words back to him after clips of the exchange went viral, criticizing him as both a bully and a wimp for threatening a lawsuit. Melber responded by locking his account.
If he didn’t say it, this Fox News clip seems like an incredible advancement in deep fake AI technology:
Ari Melber of MSNBC says: “Trump was his own biggest prop: a large white bandage on his injured right ear, a spectacle.” pic.twitter.com/KCMP7DSkHh
On the front page of The New York Times on August 26 is a story explaining that the Harris campaign has an allergy to noting their candidate was born in the radical tumult of Berkeley in the 1960s. Instead, a convention video listed her childhood home as located in “East Bay.” It can’t be “The People’s Republic of Berkeley” in anyone’s reintroduction to moderate voters.
Reporters Heather Knight and Alexandra Berzon acknowledged Kamala’s mother Shyamala was “steeped in the social activism vibrant in both Berkeley and Oakland.” They told readers that the word “Berkeley” went missing early in her career, when Harris ran for Attorney General of California in 2008.
But in other places, it’s more explicit. On their podcast The Daily — broadcast across the country on taxpayer-subsidized National Public Radio — Times reporter Astead Herndon underlined that activism was prominent in her upbringing.
“This is someone who is growing up really around not only just a Black community, but a very prideful, rich history of Blackness…The Black Panthers’ headquarters was blocks from her house.” Her parents made “a very intentional effort to place their children in Black affirmation spaces,” teaching black history in a radical activist way.
The “reintroduction” shapers also left out Kamala’s teenage years in Canada. From 1976 to 1982 (from roughly 12 to 18), she lived in Montreal, where her mother worked at McGill University. The Times noted Montreal “fared even worse than Berkeley” at the convention. “The city’s name was completely excised from Ms. Harris’s re-telling of her childhood.”
Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area the summer after her freshman year in college, is a recent addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job, telling the crowd that she “was a student when I was working in a McDonald’s.”
McDonald’s boasts that one in eight Americans has worked at the fast food chain, and Harris, whose campaign is light on policy and heavy on image, has been using her fast food job to portray what the Washington Post, in a credulous piece this month on the Harris-McDonald’s connection, described as “her humble background.” (Harris is the daughter of an eminent cancer researcher, whom her campaign calls “a working mother,” and a tenured Stanford economist, who split when Harris and her sister were children.)
Early this month, Harris’s campaign said she used her McDonald’s wages to pay for college. “Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to put herself through college,” campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said this month. A pro-Harris super PAC ad said she “work[ed] her way through school at McDonald’s.” And former president Bill Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, joked that “she’ll break my record as president who has spent the most time at McDonald’s.”
At the same time, however, Harris’s image makers tweaked the story ever so slightly. According to an August 14 item in Politico, an early cut of a Harris campaign ad said she worked at McDonald’s to “pay her way” through college. Aides changed the script to reflect that “she really took the summer job just to earn a bit more spending money,” as Politico put it.
The Politico story, which was published just hours after the Washington Free Beacon reached out to the Harris campaign with a series of detailed questions about Harris’s claims regarding her job at McDonald’s, didn’t say when exactly—or where—Harris worked at the restaurant. The campaign did not respond to the Free Beacon’s inquiries.
It is possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s. But the absence of that detail in public records and her campaign’s coyness and refusal to provide any further details raise questions about what is now a foundational narrative.
Ed Morrissey asks, “So … is Harris faking the fryer? Flipping us the Filet-O-Fish? Giving us a bad shake for the sake of humble apple pie?”
I have a very hard time seeing why anyone would fake this kind of claim, because there’s really no upside to it. No one puts “McDonald’s fryer chef” on a professional resumé, after all, so a lack of track record on this before her first presidential run is at least explicable. I’d bet that this turns into a “Corn Pop” story — presumed fabulism that suddenly gets confirmed by witnesses, to everyone’s surprise. At some point, her fellow fryers and flippers will come forward with “My Summer With Kamala” stories, and this will all be a trivia point.
But if it is fake … don’t count on the media to cover it. Call it professional courtesy from the Fake News industry.
All of us had some fun at Harris’ expense on Monday, thanks to a little satire I wrote for you about her pathetic attempts to distance herself from the Biden-Harris record of “achievements” while also blaming Donald Trump for them. If you read Harris’ quotes — which I did not make up for Monday’s column — you’d think Trump had been president for the last four years.
Inflation? Trump’s fault. Record house prices? Trump’s fault. Slouching towards World War III? Trump’s fault. Border chaos? Trump’s fault.
And that brings us to today’s flip-flop, coming close on the heels of Harris doing the Triple Lindy on banning fracking, gun confiscation, decriminalizing illegal border crossings, decreasing funding for the Border Patrol, eliminating private health insurance, Medicare for All, court-packing SCOTUS, defunding police, Green New Deal, EV mandates, and (I’m running out of breath here) a federal jobs guarantee.
Harris wants to build the wall.
Somebody get her a red MAGA hat, won’t you?
No, wait — the New York Post already did that for us.
As Ann Coulter wrote way back in 2004, “both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.”
Lai Chun-pong was found guilty of the alternative charge of conspiracy to cause explosion with intent to endanger life or property. He was found not guilty of the original charge of conspiracy to commit bombing of prescribed objects, and cleared of a separate charge of conspiracy to murder.
The panel delivered their verdicts on Thursday following the landmark trial under the UN (Anti-Terrorism Measures) Ordinance.
Cheung Chun-fu, Cheung Ming-yu, Yim Man-him, Christian Lee, Justin Hui, Lau Pui-ying, and Lai were charged over a thwarted bomb plot to murder police officers during a rally in Wan Chai on December 8, 2019.
Lau was cleared of conspiracy to provide or collect property to commit terrorist acts. Lee, Hui, Yim, Cheung Chun-fu and Cheung Ming-yu were all cleared of the alternative bombing conspiracy charges and the murder conspiracy charges.
The nine-member jury of six women and three men had to reach a unanimous decision, or a decision agreed on by at least seven jurors, for an effective verdict.
Seven members of the panel found Lai guilty, while two said he was not guilty. He was found not guilty for the alternative bombing conspiracy charge and the murder conspiracy charge, both with an 8-to-1 split.
The other defendants were unanimously found not guilty for the bombing conspiracy and murder conspiracy charges. Lau Pui-ying was found not guilty by a seven-juror majority.
Clearly not the result Beijing would have wanted — Hong Kong still has some fight left in it.
UPDATE: A friend from Hong Kong notes that Hong Kong judges, in judge-only trials, have been much quicker to convict than juries. This makes sense, as judges are far more dependent on — and part of — the apparat than juries are. Which is why we have juries. And, probably, why Hong Kong soon won’t.
MISSING BOUNCE: Vice-President Kamala Harris was supposed to get a big bounce in the polls as a result of the DNC Lovefest in Chicago. The Issues & Insights guys say they are having a hard time finding that bounce.
The Suezmax tanker—the largest size that can transit the canal when laden—had taken on cargo in Iraq, and its final destination was Europe, brokers said. It is one of dozens of commercial ships that risk traversing the Suez route each day despite ongoing threats from the Houthis.
The extent of the damage to the vessel isn’t known because efforts by salvage teams to reach it have been stymied by the Houthis, according to U.S. and United Nations officials.
“Sounion now sits immobilized in the Red Sea, where it is on fire and appears to be leaking oil, presenting both a navigational hazard and a potential environmental catastrophe,” Gen. Pat Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said late Tuesday.
The Biden-Harris administration is notably silent, too.
Trump has been suggesting Kamala Harris isn’t really a Black woman, or at least doesn’t identify as one. Naturally left-wingers are deeply offended by this line of questioning, and view it as yet another racial aggression from the WORLD’S WORST PERSON™. There are plenty of conservatives who are also uncomfortable with Trump’s questions about Kamala’s race. Some say it’s a distraction. Some say it’s Trump’s ego clouding his judgement. Some say he needs to stop obsessing about this meaningless issue because it makes him look petty and unstable.
There’s something I’ve learned to do with Trump when he utters uncomfortable things – which he does frequently. The instinct of the modern American, particularly in the intellectual class, is to clutch one’s pearls and declare the questionable utterances “unhelpful” or “Trump’s ego in action.” It can end there, if you let it. But I’ve learned to ask, “Is it true?”
Nine times out of ten, if you look past the uncomfortable bluntness of Donald Trump and just evaluate the thought he’s conveying, he is saying something true.
So, when I heard him being (seemingly) petty about Kamala’s race case, I first cringed and then asked, “Well, is it true? Does it matter if Kamala considers herself black or not?”
I’ve thought about that for a while now and I’ve come to the conclusion that, yes, it does matter. And yes, Trump is right to bring it up. . . . Trump’s point is that Harris never really identified as a Black woman before very recently. Critics says she was part of an HBCU and that’s proof enough of her identity claims, but even white people attend HBCUs.
He usually is. The pearl-clutching doesn’t come from any sort of decency or delicacy. It is a defensive mechanism to keep people from talking about things that undercut the narrative.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Revisiting the ‘Kamala Harris As Sacrificial Lamb’ Theory. “The powers that be in the Democratic party could be thinking that, if Harris wins, they will need another bus under which to throw the head of the party. They can triple the amount of handlers that Biden had and she’ll still find a way to muck up the works.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
Kamala Harris’ only job in the interview is not to embarrass herself.
Dana Bash’s job is to pitch softballs so she doesn’t embarrass herself.
Tim Walz’s job is to jump in and save her if it looks like she will embarrass herself.
The fact that the US Navy seems to have entirely given up on securing access to the Suez Canal – only one of the top five or so strategic locations on Planet Earth – and nobody's gotten so much as a letter of reprimand over this strategic defeat is genuinely disturbing. pic.twitter.com/hT4J7oyzIY
The automaker has taken “a fresh look” at its DEI policies and practices over the past year to take in to account the evolving “external and legal environment related to political and social issues,” according to an internal communication that was shared with global Ford employees and posted on X on Wednesday by an anti-DEI activist. Ford confirmed the letter was authentic and said it had no additional comment on the matter.
Ford’s move follows retailer Tractor Supply, which one of the first major companies to stop its DEI efforts, as it severed ties earlier this summer with the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, and retired DEI targets like boosting the number of employees of color at the manager level.
Harley Davidson, whose board of directors includes Ford CEO Jim Farley, also decided last week to stop consulting the HRC’s metric for treatment of LGBTQ+ employees and affirmed that it does not have a DEI function.
Home improvement retailer Lowe’s joined the efforts earlier this week, and noted that it might also make additional changes to the policies over time.
The companies have cited conservative backlash or changing social and political environments in their announcements. Tractor Supply and Harley Davidson also noted a desire to appeal to their more rural or conservative-leaning customers.
Companies that make pickups, motorcycles, and tractors should have known better before they went all-in on DEI.
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