NELLIE BOWLES: TGIF: We’re All Garbage.

The world is probably ending on Tuesday, as Democracy Dies in Darkness, so this might be the last TG ever written. Let’s make it count. Happy belated Halloween!

We’re all garbage: While Kamala Harris stood outside the White House to deliver her closing pitch to America, looking amazing and elegant in a bright white cowl neck (not sorry! She’s a 10!), Joe Biden made his own closing remarks. From a video call at the White House residence, he called Trump supporters feral trash rats. In Biden’s words: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”

He was responding to a fairly offensive joke said at a Trump rally by a boorish comedian: “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” The crowd reaction was mixed to negative. And then Biden said that the only trash is Trumpers—it was like watching the Democrats be handed a gift from Team Trump only to watch them crumple it up and hand it back.

Right on cue, America’s reporters snapped into action to deny that Biden said exactly what Biden said. He didn’t mean Trump supporters were trash, he meant that they litter, said The Washington Post.

The White House press office slightly altered the transcript—a “breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity,” according to the White House stenographers—making it seem like he was talking about the supporters’ rubbish, like “Hey, don’t forget your supporters’ garbage should be separated into plastic and paper,” and Politico ran cover. My only question is: Don’t mainstream reporters ever get tired of running interference for Joe and Kamala? Don’t they ever want to just relax, drop their shoulders, and write about the words they say out loud? You can have a hundred delicately placed apostrophes in that sentence; it won’t change the fact that Biden called Trumpers “garbage.”

Hugh Hewitt, long one of the calmest conservative talk radio hosts ever, finally loses it among the Post’s Democratic Party operatives with bylines: Hugh Hewitt quits Washington Post after storming off livestream talk over dispute with liberal columnists: ‘I won’t come back.’

🚨 GANGSTER!

Hugh Hewitt rips his earpiece out and walks off set LIVE on-air while calling the Washington Post an 'election ad' for Kamala. Hugh was enraged that the segment did not fairly report on Trump's election integrity victories

Then the entire broadcast IMPLODES

WATCH pic.twitter.com/DNnM0vVwmh

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 1, 2024

Over to you, Jeff; as Mark Hemingway tweets, “You can bet Bezos is going to see this. This is Exhibit A for the problems he’s been talking about.“

US JOBS GROWTH PLUNGES DAYS BEFORE ELECTION:

US hiring slowed significantly last month, in what marked the weakest jobs growth reported under President Joe Biden.

Friday’s downbeat employment update, released just days before the US election, revealed just 12,000 non-farming jobs were added in October, down from 223,000 a month earlier.

This marked the slowest rate of growth since late 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as analysts blamed the impact of hurricanes and strike action at Boeing.

While hiring slowed, America’s unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.1pc.

The closely watched report will be sure to draw scrutiny from both presidential candidates before next Thursday’s election, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump battle to convince voters of their ability to improve the economy.

Not to mention, the media going all-in on attacking the Bad Orange Man, since they can’t use these dreadful numbers to prop up Kamala in the closing weekend: Deceptive Snakes at Kamala’s HQ Straight-Up Nuked for Editing Trump Speech to Look Like Liz Cheney Threat.

And thus, on the weekend before the election, we’ve entered some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Vox’s Zack Beauchamp is a voice of sanity:

As Jim Treacher tweets, “You know you f**ked up when Gaza Bridge Dude tells you to pump the brakes.”

At his Substack, Treacher adds: “Remember when it was cool to fantasize about a Republican politician actively fighting in a war?”

I don’t remember anybody crying about The Onion wanting to “assassinate” Bush.

That was then, this is now. If it weren’t for double standards, Democrats would have none at all.

The DNC-MSM going all-in to defend the Cheneys (after begging Dubya to endorse Kamala) 20 years after the above Onion page is just astonishing to watch.

UPDATE: Hmmm:

Well, that would make the gang at the Bulwark very happy.

ED MORRISSEY: RIP, Jazz Shaw (1959-2024). “How do you say goodbye to your brother from another mother?”

HOW IT STARTED: Biden White House pledges data, transparency, respect for free press.

—Reuters, January 20th, 2021.

How it’s ending: AP sources: White House altered record of Biden’s ‘garbage’ remarks despite stenographer concerns.

Biden created an uproar earlier this week with his remarks to Latino activists responding to racist comments at a Trump rally made by the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to the U.S. island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

Biden, according to a transcript prepared by the official White House stenographers, told the Latino group on a Tuesday evening video call, “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

The transcript released by the White House press office, however, rendered the quote with an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” which aides said pointed to Biden criticizing Hinchcliffe, not the millions of Americans who are supporting Trump for president.

The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”

“If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” the supervisor wrote, adding, “Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.”

As Sean Davis tweets, “Nothing to see here, just the Biden-Harris administration deliberately falsifying federal records.”

And trying to survive the last full week of the election: Washington Post Spins Furiously on ‘Garbage!’ ‘Biden’s Defense Is Entirely Plausible.’ The WaPo’s headline was “Did Biden call Trump supporters ‘garbage’? It comes down to an apostrophe.”

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE — FOR A MASSIVE KINSLEY GAFFE:

The cast of the Avengers, who all now look like they have terminal illnesses…

Say "down with democracy" and "tear down democracy" in support of Kamala.

This doesn't quite hit the way they intended it to. pic.twitter.com/1J3uDKgv5P

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) October 31, 2024

Come back Thanos, all is forgiven!

CONSERVING CONSERVATISM MOST CONSERVATIVELY:

Oops https://t.co/fRLBrrLTUb

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) October 31, 2024

Flashback: Why do NeverTrumpers think they can run the Democratic party?

‘STRONG, INTELLIGENT’ REPUBLICAN WOMEN TORCH KAMALA SUPPORTER MARK CUBAN FOR DISMISSIVE COMMENTS ON THE VIEW:

Hell hath no fury like a strong, intelligent, Republican woman scorned.

It’s a lesson billionaire Mark Cuban learned the hard way when he emphatically stated on “The View” that former President Donald Trump is “never” around any “strong and intelligent women,” bringing prominent GOP women out of the woodwork to put him in his place.

“They’re intimidating to him. He doesn’t like to be challenged by them. Nikki Haley will call him on his nonsense with reproductive rights and how he sees and treats and talks about women. I mean, he just can’t have her around. It wouldn’t work,” Cuban said on the show Thursday morning.

His bumbling remarks come one day after President Biden wrote off Trump supporters as “garbage,” the double-barrel insults from the two Harris supporters coming less than a week before Election Day.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY):

“Democrats have an uncanny ability to say what they think, to show their disdain for the American people. And just two days ago, Joe Biden, the sitting president of the United States, called 250 million Americans ‘garbage.’ And then we have Kamala Harris’s top ally basically calling women who support President Trump weak and dumb, saying that you can’t be strong and intelligent and support President Trump. That is the disgraceful closing argument that Democrats are making.”

There are no atheists in foxholes, and in the last week of a presidential election, there’s suddenly no shortage of leftist biologists who can identify what a woman is.

Things get awfully sketchy during all the other weeks, however:

SETH MANDEL: Purging Jews From the Arts.

Sally Rooney is a clarifying figure in the literary world. She does not go for complexity or nuance, and she doesn’t like to leave herself open to interpretation. Rooney has now written the same novel four times, likely to avoid any possible confusion over what it is she wants to say. And rather than hide behind some disingenuous claim of “just anti-Zionism,” she does things like oppose her last novel’s translation into Hebrew, an act of overt hostility to Jews and only Jews.

So it’s no surprise to find Rooney’s name atop a McCarthyite attempt to purge the arts of the People of the Book. What’s more interesting is to see who else jumps on Rooney’s straight-talk express and whether the wider societal reaction reaches a fraction of what it ought to be.

Hundreds of writers have joined what is framed as a boycott but is actually the institution of a global loyalty oath for Jews. The novelist Rachel Kushner, whose new book contains a rather creepy rant aimed at French Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, is one of the more famous of Rooney’s inquisitors. Junot Diaz, like a once-famous emo act reuniting for a Gen X nostalgia tour, is on there as well.

Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher novels, is not on there. He objected to the purge, as did Lionel Shriver and Howard Jacobson. The crux of the loyalty test is as follows:

“We will not cooperate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that:

“A) Are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices or by whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide, or

“B) Have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.”

You are to be unpersoned, that is, if you write about Israel without denouncing the Jewish state—a rule that is intended to disqualify Jewish writers of any and every nationality—or if you are Israeli and have not renounced your country and your people, like any Good Jew apparently would. Israelis are currently under fire from seven fronts in a war that began with an explicitly genocidal invasion by Iranian proxies, and if you do not do something to help the cause of exterminating your own people, you are heretofore banished from the arts.

I’m not sure it’s possible to top the reaction from the poet Gillian Lazarus, who said:

“The likes of Sally Rooney would boycott the likes of Amos Oz, David Grossman and Yehuda Amichai. It’s as if a composer of advertising jingles boycotted Mozart.”

The writer of the liner notes for Roger Waters’ next album just identified herself, though.

At the Free Press, Lionel Shriver adds “Count me out” of “Sally Rooney’s Literary Mob:” “Although some say we’ve passed peak woke, the modern left’s authoritarian impulse to push other people around is alive and well. It’s just that a memo must have gone out to the faithful that the agenda has switched, and now instead of black lives mattering or the climate changing, they’re all to lose their wits over Israel and stick it to the Jews. These are very obedient disciples.”

EIGHT YEARS AGO TODAY:

THE AI CHATBOTS ARE ROOTING FOR KAMALA.

Silicon Valley may pride itself on being a home for people who think outside the box. Yet when it comes to the hottest product in tech right now—artificial intelligence chatbots—there’s a stunning amount of political groupthink.

The country is evenly divided between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. But when we asked five of the biggest language models—ChatGPT, Grok, Llama via Meta AI, Claude, and DeepSeek—to assess the positions of the two presidential candidates on a multitude of pressing issues, the answers were mostly the same.

Which candidate has the “right” platform on healthcare? Abortion? Criminal justice? According to the machines, with only one exception, the answer was always Harris.

Why is this concerning? Generation Z are AI power users, with up to 75 percent using the technology to plan meals, create workouts, and assist with job applications. They already use AI daily to help them make decisions, so it is not difficult to assume they could use these platforms to decide how to vote.

On Wednesday, The Free Press asked the five artificial intelligence assistants to answer 16 policy questions on a spectrum of issues—from the economy and inflation to gun control and climate change. (We excluded Google’s Gemini, which has been specifically programmed not to answer questions about 2024 elections worldwide.) We asked the bots to answer the questions first as if they were Donald Trump, and then answer as if they were Vice President Kamala Harris.

* * * * * * * *

Four AI assistants—ChatGPT, Grok, Llama via Meta AI, and DeepSeek—said Kamala Harris’s policies were right and that they agreed with her responses on each and every issue. Click to read this spreadsheet for our full list of questions and the AI’s answers.

Having grown up in a middle class cybernetic family, and really, really loving Venn diagrams, Skynet remains unburdened by what has been.

AVOID ALL ONTOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS OF COCKSUREDNESS: Axios: What Trump is being told. “A new internal memo by Tony Fabrizio, chief pollster for all three of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, tells the former president he’s in a radically better position than he was right before the 2020 election. Why it matters: The memo reflects the exuberance that Trump staffers and allies exude in interviews and behind-the-scenes conversations. The optimistic framing could make it even more difficult for Trump followers to accept a loss as legitimate.”

Related: MAGA world’s hyper-confidence raises risk of post-election meltdown.

STEVE KRAKAUER: Washington Post endorsement debacle exposes our ‘zombie elites.’

The Washington Post is a “Zombie Elite” — a formerly important institution that doesn’t know it is already dead. It is stiffly wandering around with a smug facade of elitism, not realizing the power and influence it formerly possessed have been deeply — and likely irreparably — eroded.

The Post is not alone in today’s culture. There are examples of Zombie Elites throughout the media landscape, as legacy mainstays like CBS News and ABC News have been drained of their elite status. Zombie Elites exist in government, the scientific community and the foreign policy world. During the Trump Era, but particularly in the past four years since the COVID pandemic and the rise of independent media overcoming the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” more Zombie Elites than ever are walking among us.

But at the same time, the Washington Post is a particularly notable kind of media Zombie Elite. What major story has the outlet broken in the past few years? The New York Times has essential new media properties, like “The Daily” podcast (and Wordle!). What inroads into the future has the Post made? When the rest of the establishment press temporarily rediscovered their interest in telling the truth about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline between the debate disaster and his eventual withdrawal from the race, the Post barely contributed to the conversation.

And in a sign of failure even among insider-y journalistic elitism, it hasn’t even won a Pulitzer Prize in two years.

Bezos has a noble stated goal of no longer talking “to ourselves,” and both being, and appearing to be, less biased. But a skeptical audience’s trust can’t be reestablished through the billionaire boss torpedoing an endorsement at the last minute. It requires full-scale reinvention.

At the PJ Mothership, Mark Tapscott asks: Will Jeff Bezos Save the Washington Post the Way Elon Musk Rescued X?

Otherwise, how many more headaches like he’s had over the past couple of weeks does Bezos need from a publication that’s largely a money pit? Or as Ira Stoll asked in June: Who Will Be the Washington Post’s Next Owner?

(Via Ace of Spades.)

COLIN ALLRED EMBRACES PRO-FARRAKHAN PASTOR WHO ACCUSED ISRAEL OF ‘APARTHEID’ ONE DAY AFTER OCT. 7.

BYRON YORK: You can’t tell who’s winning this race. “The bottom line is that there is an extraordinary amount of voter enthusiasm and intensity behind Harris at the moment. Some Republicans look at big Trump rallies and assume that there has to be less passion on the other side. That’s not the case. It doesn’t mean that Harris will win, but that enthusiasm and the poll numbers make it clear that this election is wide open with less than a week to go.”

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: How Gender Ideology Captured the State Department.

The U.S. Department of State is charged with advancing American interests abroad through complex and delicate diplomatic missions, as well as maintaining the safety of those missions and the Americans serving them.

The institution’s lodestar should be the national interest, but under President Joe Biden, the State Department has demoted that critical objective in favor of a new global agenda: to spread radical gender theory to foreign nations.

The shift began at the top. President Biden and, in turn, the apparatus beneath him led America’s leftward charge on the world stage. Upon taking office in 2021, the administration used the previous year’s racial unrest as a pretext to issue a slew of executive orders and memoranda entrenching left-wing ideologies in all levels of the federal government, under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.

As part of this initiative, the White House required each federal agency to submit detailed DEI progress reports regularly, appoint a chief diversity officer, and create “Agency Equity Teams,” whose leaders were tasked with “delivering equitable outcomes.” These requirements contributed to what the president called “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

The gender component of this agenda spread to the State Department through the president’s “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World.” Published in February 2021, this memorandum directed State and other agencies to monitor closely and report on the “LGBTQI+” policies of our allies, to “broaden the number of countries willing to support and defend” the radical Left’s understanding of gender—for example, by funding pro-transgender “civil society advocates” in order to shift public opinion in those countries—and to tie in the principles of gender theory to America’s foreign-aid programs.

What could possibly go wrong?

20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: More Apple Intelligence Features Like ChatGPT Drop With the iOS 18.2 Developer Beta.

Apple’s push for generative AI, under the none-too-subtle name of Apple Intelligence, took another step forward with the developer beta software releases for iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2 and MacOS Sequoia 15.2. The drop includes even more Apple Intelligence features like GenMoji, Image Playground and the ChatGPT integration for Siri.

This release follows the latest iOS 18.1 public beta, which includes a handful of Apple Intelligence features like AI-suggested writing tools that pop up in documents or emails, photo tools including Clean Up to remove unwanted parts of an image, and a number of Siri changes. The most conspicuous changes to Siri include a new voice designed to sound more natural, the ability to understand the context of conversations, a new glowing border around the display when Siri is running, and a new double-tap gesture on the bottom of the screen to type to Siri.

Those early Apple Intelligence tools are expected to drop next week with the public release for iOS 18.1. Rumors from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman point to Apple releasing some Apple Intelligence features on Oct. 28. The iOS 18.2 developer beta has even more features includes visual intelligence for the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro which uses the new Camera Control button to trigger a search of whatever the camera is pointed at — similar to Google Lens.

I know that Apple is taking a slow and somewhat cautious approach to integrating AI into their products, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it shapes up. Right now, AI seems like it’s where the Apple II and TRS-80 were in the late ’70s and early ’80s: the potential is certainly there, but the road forward to reach it may be quite long. I installed IOS 18.1 on my iPhone and iPad recently; right now, this cartoon neatly summarizes what it initially seems to add to those devices:

WSJ: A Harris Victory Means a Fourth Obama Term. At home, she’s no centrist. Abroad, she seems unprepared for the dangers ahead.

You have to admire Democrats for their audacity. They claimed for more than a year that the clearly declining Joe Biden was mentally fit enough to serve another four years. When the June debate made that untenable, they did a 180-degree turn and anointed his Vice President as their nominee while claiming, without so much as a nod of embarrassment, that she somehow represents “a new way forward.”

Republicans could never pull off that one. And in the end neither has Ms. Harris, if you take her at her word. Asked on “The View” on Oct. 8 what she might do differently from the last four years, Mr. Biden’s loyal number two said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” That was the truest line spoken in what has been a notably dishonest and dispiriting election campaign on both sides.

Ms. Harris has presented herself as new based largely on her biography. But as far as policies and coalition go, she represents more of the same, and not merely of the last four years. Her candidacy is best understood as an attempt to continue the progressive political wave that began in 2006 with the GOP defeat in Congress and rolled ashore as a tsunami amid the financial panic of 2008. She is running for what essentially would be Barack Obama’s fourth progressive term.

Based upon the role she’s been playing in Obama’s third term, I really can’t say she deserves the promotion. Especially after she bungled all of the tasks she was given by Biden in an effort to demonstrate her competency. (Or the lack thereof.)

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Here Collapses Under Weight of Its Gimmick.

Last year, Harrison Ford looked like his old self in “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” The de-aging effects weren’t perfect, but it still felt like Doc Brown’s DeLorean had taken us back to 1981.

Magical.

“Here,” based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, takes that visual approach to a new level. However, much like “Dial of Destiny” the film supporting it can’t measure up.

Director Robert Zemeckis reunites “Forrest Gump” alums Tom Hanks and Robin Wright for a cloying drama set in one expansive room.

Really. That’s both a spoiler alert and a warning.

“Here” literally spans millions of years. The story opens with dinosaurs rumbling over a green expanse of land. We fast forward through the centuries until we end up watching that very space taken up by 20th-century Americans.

Yes, Zemeckis and co. are needlessly flexing the production’s CGI budget here for no discernible effect.

We land on several overlapping stories, including the saga of Richard and Margaret (Hanks and Wright). We watch Richard, or Ricky as a boy, grows up before our eyes. The action plays out in the family’s living room, where a long, cozy sofa dominates the room.

Get used to that setup. It’s the only one you’ll see.

F/X gurus de-age both Hanks and Wright to convincingly show them as a young couple, a budding family and, years later, a duo struggling in their empty nest years. It helps that the static shot means few close-up shots.

The trailer sold Here as an intriguing family movie perfect for the holiday season, but according to Toto, it’s a CGI de-aging movie that’s filmed almost entirely on one set? At least Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman had plenty of gangster action in a multitude of locations, in addition to all of the de-aging effects, before its painfully inert last hour.

BEN SHAPIRO: NY Times, Media Matters Pressuring ‘YouTube to Demonetize and Penalize’ Conservatives.

The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro exposed the New York Times and Media Matters working together to pressure YouTube to silence conservative voices.

We also know the NYT contacted Tucker Carlson. Shapiro said the newspaper contacted others at The Daily Wire, too.

The far-left “media watchdog” organization founded by David Brock goes after conservatives, establishing boycotts and campaigns to boycott those voices.

Andrew Breitbart received a lot of wrath from the group, along with those who worked with him, like Dana Loesch.

Here’s Ben’s long Twitter thread.

The Washington Post also decided to get in on the action, sending Shapiro an email with near identical language to the one sent by the New York Times’ Nico Grant.  Fortunately (this time at least) “YouTube didn’t cave:”

Grant, who earlier this week had locked down his Twitter page, has since reactivated it to promote his new article, which can be found here. His tweet linking to his hit piece (which presumably had the blessings of his editors at the Times in order to be published there), is getting the ratio it deserves:

Evergreen:

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The close election that ended in a rout: Could 2024 be a replay of 1980?

Polls have consistently indicated that this year’s presidential race is exceedingly close.

At the same time, there have been a few murmurs among analysts that the election endgame could repeat that of 1980, when pollsters erroneously projected a close race between President Jimmy Carter and California’s former Republican governor, Ronald Reagan.

That election ended in a near-landslide for Reagan, who won the popular vote by nearly 10 percentage points. The outcome, said the New York Times, left Americans scratching their heads “over how Ronald Reagan won an overwhelming victory in what was supposed to be a close presidential election.”

It was an outcome pollsters had not foreseen, and afterward, they quarreled openly about why their surveys had failed to provide an accurate sense of what the election would bring. “Pollsters spat over why they erred so badly,” read a post-election headline in the Los Angeles Times.

Could this year’s race turn out similarly, in a decisive result unanticipated by the polls? Might the expected tight race morph into a clear popular vote victory, if not a landslide, for former President Trump or Vice President Harris?

Read the whole thing.

THE DISINFORMATION DOUBLE STANDARD:

If you don’t know what the last day of voting is by now you shouldn’t be allowed to vote. You are even more brain-dead than Joe Biden at 8 p.m.

Yet ordinary Americans were investigated, prosecuted, and jailed for making jokes about voting on a Wednesday or Thursday after the election.

It was election interference, misinformation, and a conspiracy to steal the election.

Douglas Mackey was sentenced to jail for 9 months for posting such a meme, which was the equivalent of the old joke that we should vote early and vote often–a joke told by innumerable politicians and comics. But it was a joke made by a Republican, so it is out of bounds and must be punished.

Jimmy Kimmel just made a similar joke to millions, not hundreds, and the entire establishment will no doubt come to his defense. Nothing will happen, just as nothing happens when celebrities muse about shooting Donald Trump, chopping off his head, stabbing him, bombing the White House, or any other call to violence against “Nazi” Republicans.

It’s good to be in the nomenklatura.

JOE ROGAN INTERVIEWS JD VANCE (Video):

COMING SOON TO A CITY NEAR YOU? As SF DA, Harris Raised the Bar for Murder Charges ‘Unbelievably High.’ So Cops Started Going around Her.

As San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris developed such a reputation for her unwillingness to prosecute murder cases that police regularly went around her to secure arrest warrants and would even seek out more aggressive federal prosecutors when they had a case they felt should be pursued.

Five months after Harris took office, police began taking the unprecedented step of going to judges to obtain Ramey warrants, which are issued before charges have officially been brought by a prosecutor, in order to arrest murder suspects, according to local media reports. Police also brought local murder cases to federal prosecutors to handle instead of Harris’s office. They also routinely pushed a reluctant Harris to work with grand juries to build cases and protect witnesses who may be afraid of coming forward.

Kamala was too busy focusing on infinitely more serious issues: busting pot smokers and parents of truant children.

RIP, JAZZ SHAW:

JANE FONDA HARDEST HIT: Big Tech Is Paving the Way for a Nuclear Breakthrough.

Small modular nuclear reactors long seemed like moonshots with lots of promise but not enough commercial interest. That changed recently after tech giants with surging power needs for AI processing swooped in with announcements backing SMR projects.

Earlier this month, Google parent Alphabet said it signed a power purchase agreement with Kairos Power for an up-to-500-megawatt SMR project. Amazon said it would work with X-energy on a 320 MW project that is jointly backed by a utility in Washington state. These SMR projects won’t be built overnight. Both Google and Amazon expect their initial projects to come online by the 2030s at the earliest. Oracle is another company to watch: Chairman Larry Ellison said in an earnings call in September that the company is designing a 1 Gigawatt-plus data center with building permits for three SMR reactors.

SMRs come with the potential to solve some of nuclear energy’s biggest headaches: Cost, safety and time—at least, in theory. That is why tech companies’ backing is so crucial. The industry needs to test and learn before it can prove out the benefits.

Faster, please.

Earlier: Leftist realizes killing nuclear power means more C02 emissions, news at 11.