CAN’T THEY JUST PAGE HIM? Potential successor to Hezbollah leader Nasrallah has been out of contact following Israeli airstrike.

The potential successor to slain Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has been out of contact since Friday, a Lebanese security source said on Saturday, after an Israeli airstrike that is reported to have targeted him.

In its campaign against the Iran-backed Lebanese group, Israel carried out a large strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs late on Thursday that Axios cited three Israeli officials as saying targeted Hashem Safieddine in an underground bunker.

The Lebanese security source and two other Lebanese security sources said that ongoing Israeli strikes on Beirut’s southern suburb – known as Dahiyeh – since Friday have kept rescue workers from scouring the site of the attack.

Assuming Safieddine has assumed room temperature, the headlines on his obit from the DNC-MSM will be following this pattern:

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Walz-Plant Edition.

OUT ON A LIMB: Comparing Helene To Katrina Suggests Americans Are Left To Die Because Democrats Run The White House.

FIREFIGHTERS BRAVELY RUSHING IN TO COVER BREAKING STORIES!

● Shot: Newsweek Discovers a New Pathology on the Right: Right-Leaning Men Have a “New Obsession,” and It’s Hot Girls With Nice Bodies and Conventional Good Looks!

—Ace of Spades, today.

● Chaser: Is Disney Bad at Star Wars?

—The Hollywood Reporter, yesterday.

● Hangover: Even America’s Newspaper of Record isn’t immune to be painfully slow on the draw! Are You An Unathletic Oaf Who Gets Winded Going Up A Single Flight Of Stairs? Why Pickleball Might Be For You.

—The Babylon Bee, yesterday.

JIM TREACHER: #MeToo Is Dead, and Doug Emhoff Killed It.

Once upon a time, Democrats pretended to care what happened to women.

In 2017, following the revelation that film producer Harvey Weinstein was a serial sexual predator, Hollywood and all their fellow liberals did a thorough housecleaning. They named and shamed men who had been abusing women for years. It was #TimesUp for toxic masculinity.

Or so we were told. And told. And told. Again and again and again.

Fast-forward seven years. The president of the United States is a dementia-addled basket case, and his even more inept VP is the Democratic candidate. Most of the “news” industry is frantically trying to convince you she’ll make a good president, because they don’t care about anything but keeping Donald Trump out of office.

So, what do the journos do in 2024 when a woman comes forward with a story of abuse by a powerful man? The first thing they do is check whether there’s an (R) after the guy’s name. If not, he’s off-limits.

They’ll ignore the story as long as they can. And when they’re finally forced to say something about it, they’ll minimize it as much as possible.

They’ll even transform the powerful Democrat into the victim.

That’s what Semafor just did:

To be fair, #MeToo was dead as soon as Joe Biden was nominated, and like Biden, its desiccated husk has been impotently twitching less and less in the years since.

THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Students created a way to access personal info via AI and smart glasses.

In a shocking turn of events, someone was able to use a new high-powered tech product for evil. Two Harvard students paired the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with facial recognition software to rapidly identify strangers and compile their personal information from the internet to highlight the privacy concerns that are getting unboxed with easily accessible consumer tech.

In a video posted to X, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they built I-XRAY. The program uses the glasses to capture images of random people on campus and at a train station, identify them through a publicly accessible facial recognition search site like PimEyes, and then use a large language model (LLM) to trawl the web and compile the person’s information. Nguyen and Ardayfio could access people’s addresses, the names of their parents, and photos in mere minutes, and even approached unsuspecting people using the info they collected to make them think they had met before.

The creators said they would not release the code for this program but created it to highlight how it’s possible to build invasive tech with recent advancements like smart glasses and LLMs.

They may not be releasing the code themselves, but how hard would it be for someone to reverse engineer the process, now that the cat is out of the bag?

"The creators said they wouldn't release the code for this program but created it to highlight how it’s possible to build invasive tech with recent advancements like smart glasses and LLMs."

More here: https://t.co/2FYHsYPxPI

— Morning Brew ☕️ (@MorningBrew) October 4, 2024

“JUST WIN, BABY!” Striking Dockworkers Agree to Take a Measly 62 Percent Raise and Not Spoil the Election for Democrats. “Democrats want to win the presidential election. They have fully embraced a complete Al Davis ‘just win, baby’ mentality. If that means some traditional Democratic interest group gets the short end of the stick, there will be time and money to make amends after the election. But no part of the Democratic coalition is allowed to put its personal or parochial priorities ahead of the collective priority of winning the presidential (and down-ticket) elections. There is a discipline, focus, and clear prioritization at work on the Democratic side that simply isn’t matched by the disparate factions on the Republican side.”

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey adds that even if Kamala doesn’t win, there’s still an upside for Democrats:

Obviously, Biden and Kamala Harris needed to deliver for union members while not impacting consumers with shortages and higher prices in the days before an election. But now Biden can wash his hands of the automation issue, and so can Harris if she loses the election. The suspension leaves a stinky turd for Donald Trump if he wins just as he’s about to take office, assuming that ILA and USMX can’t settle on automation restrictions. And the rapid increase in labor costs built into the wage agreement over the next six years will incentivize USMX to expand automation as much as possible, so don’t expect this to get settled without another strike during Inauguration Week.

As with 2017, I’m sure there will be plenty of headaches and bad surprises left by Democrats for Trump to deal with over his first weeks in office if he wins next month.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Kamala Harris’s gushing tribute to Dick Cheney backfires spectacularly: ‘The single most evil man in the 21st century.’

‘Dick Cheney not only committed war crimes and helped kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but he also caused the deaths of thousands of American soldiers,’ wrote journalist Mehdi Hasan.

‘They should send Liz Cheney to Michigan to campaign for Kamala in Dearborn and Detroit. She can explain why she and her dad still support Guantanamo, CIA black sites, torture, rendition, drones and the war in Iraq,’ wrote journalist Glenn Greenwald.

‘Yeah imagine how much worse off we would be without the service of Dick Cheney,’ wrote right-leaning podcaster Saagar Enjeti sarcastically.

President Joe Biden also praised Dick Cheney on Friday after he watched Cheney and Harris campaign together.

‘I know her dad. … We argue like hell but I always admired his courage and honesty,’ Biden said, and added, ‘She and her father have character. Character dammit is what we need in this country!’

You’ll want to be sitting down when you learn that the (p)resident was singing a very different tune about Cheney back in the day: “Biden Wanted Cheney Out Too,” CBS reported on October 1st, 2006:

On CBS News’s Face the Nation Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said he thinks Rumsfeld should lose his job because of what he sees as mismanagement of the war.

Biden also said that, in an Oval Office meeting, he told President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that he wanted Cheney to step down for the same reasons.

“The present said to me, quote, ‘Why do you keep picking on Rummy?’ I looked at the president, and I said, ‘Mr. President, with all due respect’ – and I looked at the vice president – ‘Mr. Vice President, I would call for your resignation as well, were you not a constitutional officer,'” Biden told host Bob Scheiffer.

“And the president said, ‘Why would you say that?’ And I said, ‘Mr. President, not one piece of advice either Don Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney has given you has turned out to be correct with regard to Iraq.’ And the president just seems completely wedded to the notion,” Biden said.

Biden said that the president has to change the course in Iraq. Despite the presence of more than 600,000 troops in the war-torn nation, violence is increasing.

But when Schieffer asked if Biden thinks the vice president should resign, Biden said no.

“I was making the point that these guys just don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “And no one takes them seriously anymore except the president, apparently.”

On the eve of the election in 2008, Reuters reported Biden saying that “Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we’ve had probably in American history.”

It’s astounding that Kamala expects hyper-online Dems to forget all of the branding her party and its media wing did during the first decade of the 21st century, and that her core voters would suddenly believe that Hitler has left the bunker, been rehabilitated, and given a shiny new suit.

SONNY BUNCH: Megalopolis Review.

I honestly have a hard time choosing which of the bonkers performances I most enjoyed. [Adam] Driver has made something of a career out of delivering bonkers performances for aging auteurs: as a Sancho Panza stand-in for Terry Gilliam; as Enzo Ferrari for Michael Mann; and now as Cesar Catilina for Coppola’s decades-in-the-works dream project. Aubrey Plaza’s depiction of Wow Platinum is weirdly timely, given that the character is a CNBC reporter who uses her smoldering sexuality to get the goods and marry rich. When she can’t land Catilina, she instead opts for his insanely wealthy uncle, Crassus, whom Jon Voight plays for an hour with the sort of manic energy he brought to his 10 seconds of screen time as a masticating lunatic on that one episode of Seinfeld.

Crassus’s other nephew, Clodio, is played by Shia LaBeouf as a sort of cross-dressing Donald Trump double, rousing the rabble and indulging in populist rhetoric to do … something. The politics of this film are not particularly well thought out; despite Clodio’s villainy, one could easily make the case that it’s a fairly straightforwardly fascist tale about the needs of a brilliant leader to guide the dull masses and the corrupt elite out of the muck in which they wallow and into a brighter future, democracy be damned. I haven’t even mentioned Dustin Hoffman and Jason Schwartzman and Laurence Fishburne and Talia Shire and Kathryn Hunter, all of whom deliver performances at roughly 110 percent of their required wattage.

Megalopolis isn’t a good movie, precisely—I think it fails on relatively fundamental levels as both standard storytelling and airy metaphor—but I’m glad it exists and happy to know that the thousands of dollars of Coppola Merlot I’ve consumed over the years helped in some small way to will this unwieldy monstrosity into existence.

Heh, indeed. It’s been a very long time since a movie has come along with such divisive reviews. QED:

● The New Yorker: “Megalopolis” Is Francis Ford Coppola’s Artistic Rejuvenation.

● SFGate (One of Coppola’s hometown newspapers): ‘Megalopolis’ is a piece of s—t.

WELL, THAT SETTLES THAT! Whoopi Goldberg Claims Hollywood Doesn’t Have A Liberal Bias.

GRAB THAT CASH WITH BOTH HANDS AND MAKE A STASH: Pink Floyd Sells Music Rights to Sony for $400 Million.

Sony has spent more than a billion dollars on catalogs from Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Queen’s non-North American rights in the past few years (with backing from investment firms like Eldridge Industries), and has never officially comment on the deals. Variety and others reported just two weeks ago that the Pink Floyd transaction was nearing closure.

The catalog had been in play for several years with a reported asking price of $500 million, and the group was close to a deal in 2022, but the bitter infighting between the band’s members — primarily over main songwriter Roger Waters’ controversial political statements against Israel and Ukraine, and in favor of Russia — have complicated the deal enormously and scared off a number of suitors. There seems little question that Waters’ incendiary comments, which have made him a pariah from all but his biggest fans and cost him his solo record deal, devalued the catalog.

Billboard asks: Could the Floyd’s publishing rights be up next? “While Luminate doesn’t track global album sales, Pink Floyd’s on-demand global streams averaged 2.37 billion over the last three years. Consequently, if the group owns all of its publishing, Billboard estimates that the band’s recorded masters bring in about $11 million in publishing royalties annually. If the band eventually decides to sell and can achieve a 20-times multiple — the going rate for superstar songwriters — it could bring in another $200 million-plus for the band’s songwriters. In general, music publishing asset trade at a higher multiple than recorded music assets, although the latter is catching up on that front.”

UPDATE: David Gilmour Will “Absolutely Not” Perform with Roger Waters Again. “I tend to steer clear of people who actively support genocidal and autocratic dictators.” “Gilmour and Waters have been at odds for decades. In 2023 alone, Gilmour blasted Waters as a ‘misogynistic, antisemitic, Putin apologist’ and shared a documentary detailing Waters’ alleged antisemitism. The paid last shared the stage together during Roger Waters’ ‘The Wall’ tour in 2011.”

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Joe Biden inadvertently writes the epitaph for his administration:

Reporter: “What do the states in the storm zone need — after what you saw today?”

Biden: “Oh, storm zone? I didn’t know which storm you’re talking about"

Holy crappic.twitter.com/qdXRBzcr68

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 4, 2024

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Jennifer Aniston Addresses Rumors She’s Wooing Obama And Rubs Fish Sperm On Face.

—Headline, the Huffington Post, today.

CUH-RAZY! Ana Navarro Loses It Over JD Vance’s Debate Performance, Starts Ranting About Shapeshifters:

I disagree with Navarro’s premise here, but so what if she’s right? I’m so old, I can remember last month, where Kamala’s “code-switching” was absolutely endorsed by all of the best people on the left. But then, we are talking the “It’s different when we do it” party here.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Why CNN is changing up its polling for 2024.

CNN polling director Agiesta, who in May completed a one-year term as AAPOR president, declined to be interviewed for this article.

But in a CNN-sponsored discussion before the 2022 midterm elections, Agiesta addressed the question of whether polls are accurate, saying, “I would like to think that they are.”

She said pollsters had been “taking lots and lots of steps to try to correct for the errors that we have seen in past cycles,” adding: “I mean, obviously, the problems that polling had in 2016 and in 2020 were extremely well publicized. Everybody’s aware that there was an understatement of the Republican support in a lot of polling in both of those election cycles.”

Over her right shoulder, on display in the office where she spoke, was a desktop sign that bore this emphatic pronouncement, in capital letters: “ACCURACY FIRST!”

Given that she works for CNN, I’m sure she meant that strictly ironically.

JOHN NOLTE: Politico’s Ryan Lizza on Leave over Olivia Nuzzi’s Harassment and Blackmail Claims.

Politico’s chief Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza is on a leave of absence after his former fiancée Olivia Nuzzi filed a court complaint accusing him of blackmail and harassment.

Just when you thought this story could not get any more awesome…

This all started earlier in the month when Nuzzi was herself placed on leave by New York Magazine, where she was considered their star reporter. Everything fell apart when it was discovered she had been reporting on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while pursuing a personal relationship with him.

According to various sources, after interviewing Kennedy, who is married to actress Cheryl Hines, Nuzzi got flirtatious during a phone call. Kennedy responded by blocking her number. Through various machinations, she was able to convince him to unblock her once in a while. Then per the source, she would send him sexy pictures of herself. Someone leaked this information to New York Magazine. Nuzzi was put on leave. Lizza announced Nuzzi was now his EX-fiancée. Kennedy is currently looking into suing her.

But now, Now, NOW(!) things are even more juicy…

"Smells to me like a left-wing honeypot operation" https://t.co/10ldUmul7n

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) September 23, 2024

In her court complaint, Nuzzi says that Lizza “explicitly threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation—a threat he has since carried out.”

Nuzzi also claims “Lizza had stolen a personal electronic device from her, was hacking her devices, then anonymously shopping information about her to the media.” She adds that some of this information might have been “doctored” by Lizza to look worse than it was. She also believes Lizza impersonated “an anonymous campaign operative” to damage her reputation with a political campaign.

Meanwhile, with RFK Jr. accused of having additional affairs with “at least” three more women over the last year (it’s October of a presidential election, so the opposition researchers are out in full force), Cheryl Hines reaches her breaking point – her husband’s  bromance with the Bad Orange Man: Cheryl Hines may divorce RFK Jr. — but it’ll be over Donald Trump more than Olivia Nuzzi.

GREG LUKIANOFF: How Tim Walz got free speech very wrong at the Vice Presidential Debate.

When you’ve been defending free speech as long as I have, you’ve heard every bad argument against it about a billion times. And while FIRE and I have responded to these anti-free speech arguments repeatedly over the years, some of them are tougher to kill than a tardigrade. No matter how many times they are rebutted, they just keep coming back up.

In the span of about 30 seconds during last night’s Vice Presidential Debate, Minnesota governor and Democratic candidate Tim Walz managed to bring up the top three:

1. There is no ‘hate speech’ exception to the First Amendment.
2. Misinformation and disinformation are protected speech — and should stay that way.
3. Yes, you can yell ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater.

* * * * * * * *

Walz’s last comment on this during the debate is one of the most popular and enduring defenses of limiting expression, and one of the most frustrating for those of us who know anything about how free speech and the First Amendment actually work: “You can’t yell ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater.”

Yes, Governor Walz, you actually can — as many people, including Christopher Hitchens, have literally demonstrated.

What you can’t do is “falsely shout fire in a theatre and cause a panic.” The emphasis is mine, but the quote comes from an analogy that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes made in the 1919 case Schenck v. United States.

The most irritating thing about this quote is that the parts I emphasized above are often omitted, but they’re the most important because they illustrate the context of the speech in question. The idea is not that the word “fire” is forbidden in a crowded theater, but rather that attempting to incite behavior that will cause people harm (like, you know, making them think there’s a fire and causing them to freak out and stampede) is not protected speech, and actually falls under the very clearly-defined exception to First Amendment called “Incitement to imminent lawless action.”

Still, there’s even more context that makes this particular cliché irritating to encounter. Holmes’ Supreme Court opinion was one that upheld the imprisonment of two people who argued that military conscription was wrong. The Court justified the ban with Holmes’ dubious analogy, which was meant to tie back to the principle that the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that incites people to physical violence.

But the Supreme Court abandoned the logic of that case in 1925, and rightly seeing that this line of thinking was being used to justify clearly unconstitutional censorship, outright overruled it in 1969. And yet, the cliché endures, even in the mouths and minds of a candidate for the nation’s second-highest office in 2024.

And then there’s the dog that didn’t bark: Tim Walz Endorsed Censorship In Front Of Millions Of Americans And No One Cares.

Why would Democratic Party operatives with bylines object to something they completely agree with?

MARK FELTON: Iran’s Top Guns — The Last F-14 Tomcat Squadrons. In his 2022 review of Top Gun: Maverick, John Podhoretz wrote:

[W]hile Top Gun was basically a school movie—Maverick and Ice and the others are all training to be pilots at the Navy Fighter Weapons School and they compete like they are trying to make the crew team—this new one is an out-and-out war movie. Maverick returns to Top Gun as an instructor, only this time the 12 people he’s teaching are all top naval pilots and weapons officers who have long since graduated from Top Gun. The deadly serious mission is to destroy a uranium enrichment facility in an “enemy” country (though at one point I thought I heard someone say “Iran”) protected by surface-to-air missiles and better fighter jets than America possesses.

I didn’t catch any references to Iran when I saw Top Gun: Maverick, but as Mark Felton notes in his latest video, Iran’s Air Force is flying the last iterations of Maverick’s favorite plane, the Grumman F-14 Tomcat, on the planet:

Near the end of his video, Felton speculates why the Iranians keep flying this 50-year old aircraft:

The real reason why Iran still clings to its antiquated Tomcats may be something completely different from air-to-air combat. F-14s have immensely powerful radar systems, and some analysts suspect that the Iranians use their F-14s as a kind of stop gap airborne early warning platform; Iran lacking any dedicated AWACS aircraft in its fleet. The Tomcat’s ability to fly quite high and fast makes it a good reconnaissance platform. There is nothing the Russians and Chinese currently make that would match these abilities, so that may be the reason Iran keeps a handful of old F-14s flying.

But now, the Iranians have a much more powerful, albeit not very sophisticated long range detection system: President Biden Assures Iranian Air Defense: ‘Nothing Going to Happen Today.’

Iran is an American enemy. Iranian-backed militaants have killed and wounded American military personnel. Iran supported terrorists and insurgents in Iraq that killed Americans in uniform.

You would think that an American president would not merely be cheering on Israeli actions that eliminate Iranian-backed terrorist threats, he would be lending all possible aid. Instead, the Biden administration is emphasizing that it offered no assistance and played no role in the strike that killed Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

And now the president apparently thinks it’s a good idea to blurt out what he’s heard about Israeli response plans.

Here’s President Biden today:

Q    Would you support Israel striking Iran’s oil facilities, sir?

THE PRESIDENT:  We’re in discussion of that.  I think — I think that would be a little — anyway.

Biden got a question about Jack Smith, and then:

Q    (Inaudible) response to the retaliation?  Will you let Israel retaliate?  What are the plans to allow Israel to strike back against Iran?

THE PRESIDENT:  First of all, we don’t allow Israel.  We advise Israel.  And there’s nothing going to happen today.  We’ll talk about that later.

This is how President Biden helps, by announcing to the world that Israeli retaliatory strikes aren’t coming today.

Who needs AWACS, or even F-14s, when you have the patented Trunalimunumaprzure early warning system?

UPDATE: “Ayatollah Frantically Googles ‘How To Build Iron Dome Thingy FAST,’” America’s Newspaper of Record reports.

ISRAEL CONTINUES TO SETTLE ALL THE FAMILY BUSINESS: “The IDF announced the death of Rawhi Mushtaha, head of the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, on Thursday.”

BARRY AND BEN RHODES SMILE: Iran is months from the bomb – stopping it may not be easy.

Following Iran’s Tuesday-night attack on Israel – which saw the Islamic Republic launch nearly 200 missiles at Israeli territory – the question is not whether Israel will retaliate but how.

Calls to militarily target the Iranian nuclear programme are neither new nor surprising.

But while strikes may be able to roll back parts of the nuclear programme in the short term, they could ultimately exacerbate the threat and limit options to deal with it in future.

Iran does not currently possess a nuclear weapon and there has so far been no indication that Tehran has made a decision to weaponise the programme.

Nevertheless, the country possesses a near-threshold nuclear capability – meaning that it likely has much of the necessary know-how, technology and materials to develop a nuclear weapon on short notice.

Should Tehran decide to rush towards a nuclear weapon, experts have assessed that it could produce sufficient weapons-grade enriched uranium for a single weapon in under a week.

Actually developing a nuclear weapon would take months. Mounting it on warheads capable of striking an enemy like Israel may take even longer – and not guaranteed to succeed.

But it will be Biden-Harris approved as this 2022 Legal Insurrection headline spotlights: Biden Waives Sanctions on Iran’s ‘Civilian’ Nuclear Program in Bid to Restore 2015 Deal. Iranian foreign minister says Biden’s nuclear waiver “is not enough” as regime rushes to build a bomb.

HUNG CAO ANNIHILATES TIM KAINE IN SENATE DEBATE:

In the debate, the candidates were questioned about military recruitment numbers dipping. Cao pointed out that the woke agenda that has permeated the military in recent years is to blame.

“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want. What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are gonna rip out their own guts, eat ‘em and ask for seconds,” Cao said. “Those are young men and women that are going to win wars.”

* * * * * * * *

“Do you support mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants?” Cao was asked.

“Immigration is very near and dear to my heart. When Vietnam fell, we had nowhere to go and America brought us in. My parents waited in line for seven, we all did, for seven years, to get our citizenship,” Cao said. “The last thing that my dad had hang over his bed when he passed away two years ago was his naturalization certificate.”

“I love this country so much that I wrote a blank check up to including my life to defend it for 25 years…to anybody who wants to come here, don’t ask for the American dream if you’re not willing to obey American laws and embrace the American culture…that’s the no. 1 criteria coming into the country. If you come here illegally, then you need to leave, especially if you’re a violent crime person,” he said, adding that there are 13,000 convicted murders and 16,000 convicted rapists that came across under the Biden administration’s watch.

* * * * * * * *

The moderators tried to silence the audience again when Cao stated, “never go against an Asian when it comes to math.”

“Honestly, of the 227 bills that Senator Kaine has proposed, only three of them made it through… That’s a 99% failure rate,” Cao said.

“Check the tape on that. That’s completely wrong,” Kaine retorted.

“There’s two truths in the world, okay? Never walk into a target store wearing a red shirt and never go against an Asian when it comes to math. Trust me,” Cao said.

I like the cut of this man’s jib.

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Watch: Harris Wishes ‘Happy Birthday’ to Anti-Semite Al Sharpton Who Said ‘Diamond Merchant’ Jews Have the ‘Blood of Innocent Babies’ on Their Hands.

Vice President Kamala Harris praised Rev. Al Sharpton—an anti-Semite who has said that “diamond merchant” Jews have the “blood of innocent babies” on their hands—in a birthday shoutout Thursday morning.

“Happy 70th Birthday, Rev! … I celebrate the day you were born,” Harris said in a video aired on MSNBC. “You are a voice of truth, a voice of conscience, a voice of practicality around what we must address and what we can do, and I thank you so much for your friendship.”

Sharpton, a prominent Democratic ally, provoked the 1991 Crown Heights riots—one of the worst eruptions of anti-Semitic violence in American history that inspired chants such as “Let’s get the Jew!” and “Hitler didn’t finish the job!”

Violence broke out in Crown Heights after a Jewish driver accidentally killed a black child. Sharpton called for escalations.

“The world will tell us he was killed by accident,” Sharpton said at the time. “It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights. … Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights.” Sharpton said Jews have the “blood of innocent babies” on their hands.

Sharpton also defended an anti-Semitic college professor who blamed “rich Jews” for the slave trade.

It’s the ultimate heckler’s veto: Despite — or perhaps because of — that background, for a quarter of a century, every Democrat presidential candidate is apparently required to very publicly kiss Sharpton’s ring when running for the White House.

20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Harris surrounded by disaster, mayhem entering the final weeks of the presidential race.

A deadly hurricane, a massive labor strike and wars raging around the globe are among the crises engulfing the Biden-Harris administration one month before the election.

Former President Donald Trump is flipping the script on Democrats, who for months have warned voters that he would bring chaos if he returns to the White House.

“It’s a choice between freedom and chaos,” Ms. Harris told her audience at a rally in Milwaukee this summer.

Her argument isn’t resonating with voters as war erupts in the Middle East, illegal immigrants swarm across the southern border, and rural residents in Georgia and North Carolina beg for help from the Biden-Harris administration in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

President Biden toured the disaster area in North Carolina by helicopter on Wednesday as the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided aid and rescued people stranded by flooding.

The president and Ms. Harris have been criticized for waiting to visit and failing to provide enough resources as taxpayers spend millions of dollars to shelter illegal immigrants and send $175 billion in aid to Ukraine.

“We’ve given them all we have,” Mr. Biden said this week when asked whether more resources would pour into devastated areas of North Carolina and Georgia.

Mr. Biden has abdicated an active role in resolving a port worker strike that shut down all East Coast shipping on Monday. The walkout threatens economic calamity in the coming weeks. Instead, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have endorsed the strike, which is poised to disrupt the nation’s supply chain, leaving store shelves empty and sidelining thousands of workers.

“Presidential campaigns are usually decided by the two P’s — Peace & Prosperity — and right now we have neither,” said Jim McLaughlin, who polls for the Trump campaign. “The world and country are on fire, and where it’s not on fire, it’s underwater.”

Ms. Harris, he said, “can’t run away from it.”

Kamala’s line that “It’s a choice between freedom and chaos” should be placed front and center in Trump campaign ads, alongside visuals of the ongoing chaos she and Biden are doing nothing to solve, and in some cases, deliberately set in motion themselves.

Earlier: A Storm, a Strike, and a War Are All Working Against the Harris Campaign.

Don’t get cocky.™

FABULIST FUMBLES: An Imprecise Biography Catches Up With Tim Walz.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Wednesday that “I need to be clearer” after a series of misstatements and exaggerations about his experiences and biography have created a distraction for Democrats weeks before the election.

The vice-presidential nominee suffered his worst moment in Tuesday’s debate with Republican VP nominee Ohio Sen. JD Vance when he tried to explain years of repeated false statements about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests in China. Walz also has gotten into trouble for past claims including about his National Guard retirement rank and a 2018 comment about “weapons of war that I carried in war” when he was never deployed in a combat zone.

Such exaggerations are known in Minnesota as “fish tales”—embellishments often with a basis in fact—and they generally haven’t hurt Walz within the friendlier confines of state-level politics. But on the national stage they can be damaging. Those involving Walz reveal the growing pains he has experienced since his selection as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate.

“The national spotlight was sure to expose Walz’s weakness of exaggerating or being less than honest,” said Blois Olson, a nonpartisan political analyst who publishes a newsletter on Minnesota politics and has known Walz since 2006.

Olson said Walz and his team have prevented media interviews that are likely to yield follow-up questions or challenges. “The rule of thumb for Minnesota media and observers is just because he says it convincingly it doesn’t mean it’s true,” he said. “It’s his Achilles’ heel, and at some point he can’t keep running the same way.”

On Wednesday, Walz sought to play down any inaccuracies by presenting himself as an everyday guy, despite more than a decade in Congress and being elected statewide twice. “I speak like everybody else speaks,” he said during brief comments to reporters in Pennsylvania. “I need to be clearer, I will tell you that.”

A person familiar with Walz’s speaking history said the governor’s gaffes aren’t necessarily nefarious or embellishing in nature and are more a result of his casual speaking style.

No, I’d say they’re a bit nefarious, given how Walz acted in 2020, his radical chic appointees, and his “what me worry” attitude with the CCP: Tim, Don’t Try to Pass Off a Lie by Saying You “Misspoke.” Tim Walz’s love affair with China and its communist government.

OLD AND BUSTED: Partying Like It’s 1999.

The New Hotness? Partying Like It’s 2020! People are panic-buying toilet paper because of the port strike. There is no need for that.

Toilet paper shortages in stores across America are giving folks nightmarish reminders of the pandemic era. But the lack of toilet paper isn’t a direct result of a major port strike Tuesday. It’s because of panic buying.

Reports of shortages filled social media Tuesday, showing empty shelves where toilet paper and, to a lesser extent, paper towels were supposed to be.

“They cleaned out the toilet paper at my local Walmart in Virginia. Toilet paper hoarding 2.0!,” wrote one person in a post on X, along with a photo of empty shelves.

“Shelves at Costco & Target running low or out of paper towels in Monmouth County NJ,” posted another X user. “Seeing people buying TP & water too in reax to port strike. Costco employee told me they were sold out of TP/paper towels this am.”

But the strike at ports from Maine to Texas will have absolutely zero impact on the supply of these products.

The overwhelming majority — more than 90% by some estimates — of U.S. toilet paper consumption comes from domestic factories. Most of the rest comes from Canada and Mexico, which means it most likely arrives by rail or truck, not ship.

Jim Geraghty calls the longshoremen strike the “Self-Inflicted Dagger to America’s Economic Heart:”

In about as vivid an example of the “MacGuffinization of American Politics” as you’re ever likely to find, this morning the New York Times writes, “Scenes of striking workers, hurricane devastation in the Southeast and missiles over Israel represent a rare moment of turbulence for Kamala Harris.”

Yes, but this is also a “moment of turbulence” for everyone else, and perhaps a lot longer than a moment. For Harris, the International Longshoremen’s Association strike that has shut down every port on the East and Gulf Coasts is a political headache to overcome. The Democratic candidate has to finesse the reflexive, unthinking pro-union stance of Joe Biden and the ludicrous demands — a 77 percent raise for workers and zero automation — coming from Harold Daggett, the ILA boss. The guy who enjoys a $900,000 salary and drives a Bentley boasted that his strike would “cripple” the economy. (More on him below.)

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The irony is that the dockworkers’ strike is just about the best friend Donald Trump could ask for right now and, as the Times suggested, a major headache for the Harris campaign. If everybody’s frustrated by higher prices and empty shelves in the coming weeks, does that make voters feel happier or less happy with the incumbent party? The strike is terrible for the hurricane victims, terrible for the economy, and terrible for the country as a whole. But as if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s terrible for the Democrats.

Why can’t the almost-82-year-old president see the logic of this? What’s it going to take to slap some sense into him?

Doug Emhoff?

Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing, if only for Daggett’s views on the E-ZPass automated toll collection system, which explains much about his Luddite worldview.