STRENGTH THROUGH JOY: Kamala rebrands as the ‘joy’ candidate.

Democratic strategists have repeatedly assured me that she will adopt whatever platform comes out of the Democratic National Convention, which certainly won’t help the perception that she is a manufactured candidate willing to do whatever it takes to seize power, but I digress. The clear indication we are getting from the early stages of the Harris-Walz campaign is that it is all about “vibes” and the idea that Harris is selling “joy.”

After all, what better way to rebrand a deeply unpopular vice president who, in focus groups put together by her own party, is said to have a laugh that sounds more like a cackle? Joy! “Kamala Harris used to worry about laughing,” the dutiful stenographers at the New York Times said. “Now joy is fueling her campaign.” The Washington Post similarly describes Harris-Walz as seizing “on a joyous message.” Walz even thanked his running mate for “bringing back the joy.”

At the Federalist, Elizabeth Stauffer writes, “Kamala Harris Can’t Articulate The Case For Voting For Her.” So as with “hope” and “change” in ’76 and 2008, the DNC-MSM have chosen their buzzword, and are now hoping to run out the clock on their opponents:

THIS IS CNN: CNN Cut Short Interview With Tim Walz’s Ex Unit Commander Because of ‘Technical Difficulties.’

Cause of “technical difficulties:”

‘SPLAINS THOSE GUSHY ‘BIG DAD ENERGY’ BARFTASTIC ARTICLES: Minneapolis Star Tribune Publisher Worked for Walz.

More here: The role of the Star Tribune revisited.

SONNY CROCKETT, CALL YOUR OFFICE! Hurricane Debby blew $1 million worth of cocaine onto Florida beach.

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: Who Is Tim Walz?

BEAR MARKET: Joe Rogan says he supports RFK Jr. over Trump, Harris.

UPDATE: Or Not! Joe Rogan RETRACTS comment on which candidate he likes for president in 2024 after sparking outrage.

HE SEEMS NICE: Kamala’s VP Wannabe Tim Walz Levied WHOPPING 95% Tax on Zyn. “The tax on cigars, including premium cigars, smoking tobacco, chewing tobacco, e-cigarettes, and vapor products in Minnesota is also set at 95 percent.”

TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE!

Biden: "28 out of every high school students is Latino, we better start figuring it out." pic.twitter.com/Xdp9YjWryu

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) August 8, 2024

DEVELOPING: Terrifying footage shows passenger plane in an out-of-control death spiral before crashing in Brazil killing all 62 passengers and crew onboard.

STOLEN VALOR: Tim Walz Thanked Pelosi After She Recognized His Service ‘On the Battlefield.’

C-Span’s Chyron described Walz as an “Afghanistan War Veteran.”

FLASHBACK: Tim Walz thanked Nancy Pelosi at a press conference in 2007 in which she said while introducing him that "we appreciate his service on the battlefield."

CSPAN then identified Walz as an "Afghanistan veteran." pic.twitter.com/6HaKNyfKsf

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 9, 2024

‘THINK BEFORE YOU POST:’ Britain’s slide into censorship.

Britain has fallen. That’s been the take on the anti-woke chattersphere this past 24 hours, as prime minister Keir Starmer’s post-riots crackdown has taken an Orwellian turn. Alongside coming down hard on the violent racist thugs on our streets, a move no sane person has a problem with, Starmer has also trained his ire on the apparent cause of every societal ill, at least according to our ruling class: too much free speech on social media.

All week, the government has been calling on the Big Tech firms, particularly Elon Musk’s X, to do more to clamp down on misinformation and hate. Of course, we’ve seen plenty of both, online and off, recently. A lurid claim that the Southport child-killings, the spark for nearly two weeks of unrest, were committed by a Muslim asylum seeker swirled in the wake of that horror. But while you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who is passionately in favour of misinformation or hate, the past few days have reminded us of the sinister territory you enter into when the powers-that-be try to police them.

Since Musk has refused to play ball, even goading Starmer with accusations of ‘two-tier policing’ and feverish suggestions Britain is verging on ‘civil war’, the government has resorted to doing the silencing itself. Yesterday, we had director of public prosecutions Stephen Parkinson telling us that even a retweet could land you in an all-grey prison tracksuit. ‘You may be committing a crime if you repost, repeat or amplify a message which is false, threatening, or stirs up racial / religious hatred’, Parkinson told the PA news agency. ‘Think before you post’, screamed the Gov.UK X account last night, reminding Brits that ‘content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal’.

London’s chief of police hates free speech so much that he’s already attempted to smash at least one microphone, and now he’s aiming for one of the biggest:

Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley threatens to EXTRADITE and imprison American citizens over online posts.

He does not rule out Elon Musk. pic.twitter.com/AUJhEgTTtJ

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 9, 2024

鸟不是真实的: China Shows Off New Drones Disguised as Birds. “A newly released video showed a well-known Chinese elite special operations force using a biomimetic drone disguised as a small bird during a shooting competition in the country…According to Chinese military observers, this drone is classified as a miniature biomimetic ornithopter, an aerial vehicle that flies by flapping its wings like birds and insects. Due to its realistic appearance, this type of unmanned aircraft has military application potential.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD NOW DOING STRAIGHT-UP REPORTAGE: Tim Walz Clarifies That He’s Never Been To Iraq, But He Has Been To Downtown Minneapolis Which Is Basically The Same Thing.

MARK FELTON: The People Still Living in WW2 — UK Wartime Prefabs in 2024 (Video).

SPRINGTIME FOR HARRIS: Tim Walz Now Caught in a Scandal Involving a Muslim Cleric and Adolf Hitler.

Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, on at least five occasions as governor of Minnesota, hosted a Muslim cleric who celebrated Hamas‘s Oct. 7 attack last year on Israel and promoted a film popular among Neo-Nazis that glorifies Adolf Hitler, the Washington Examiner found.

The imam, Asad Zaman of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, joined other Muslim leaders in May 2023 for a meeting about mosque security with Walz’s gubernatorial office in Minnesota. Zaman also spoke at a May 2020 event to call for peaceful protests with the governor during the riots in Minnesota sparked after George Floyd’s death. In April 2019, the cleric delivered an invocation before Walz’s state address — just months after Zaman called for an end to a government shutdown at a press conference with Walz in January 2019.

Zaman, moreover, attended a May 2019 event that Walz hosted for Ramadan, social media posts show.

RIP: Juan ‘Chi Chi’ Rodriguez, popular Hall of Fame golfer, dead at 88.

RICK BEATO INTERVIEWS ALAN PARSONS (Video):

WATERGATE? AS ZHOU ENLAI NEVER SAID ABOUT THE IMPACT OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, “TOO EARLY TO SAY:” Nixon Shouldn’t Have Resigned.

What have I learned in the 50 years since? Although we are a long way from the summer of 1974, the Watergate pieties haven’t changed, and the media retrospectives this week will likely be repeating all the clichés about saving America: “The system worked.” “No man is above the law.” But a genuine retrospective of Nixon and Watergate needs to be shorn of cant and caricatures, unburdened by the clockwork bromides of “crook” or “resigned in disgrace.”

I hope new generations are open to some different thinking—or at least a balanced treatment that goes beyond the story of bungling burglars and political damage control. It must include how the “Watergate affair” was also the culmination of Nixon’s political opponents’ long-yearned-for goal of destroying him. Nixon had a political target on his back from his congressional days of vanquishing the communist Alger Hiss, a favorite of Washington’s intellectual left. Through his entire presidency, Congress was controlled by opposition Democrats, with confrontation aggravated further by Nixon’s determination to end the Vietnam War he had inherited from the Kennedy and Johnson administration planners at the State and Defense departments.

Sen. Edward Kennedy set up the Senate Watergate Committee. Three months later John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign director of opposition research against Nixon, Archibald Cox, was hired as Watergate special prosecutor with a staff seeded from the ranks of Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department. The subsequent special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, expressed concern in an internal memorandum that his chief deputy reflected “an attitude I discussed with you before—the subjective conviction that the president must be reached at all cost.”

Watergate scholar Geoff Shepard has unearthed further damning evidence that the special prosecutors had several unethical private meetings with Judge John Sirica in the absence of attorneys for Nixon and Watergate defendants—each violating the most basic legal protections. Nixon’s adversaries weren’t looking only for the truth. They were looking for a scalp.

As Glenn wrote last year, “Recent events have made me doubt the entire Watergate story.” Much more on that topic from him here: Nixon’s Revenge.

UPDATE: “Reconsidering United States v. Nixon,” from Josh Blackman at the Volokh Conspiracy.

RICHARD GOLDBERG: “Let’s have an honest conversation about what happened last night in Michigan and what’s going on right now with the @VP team’s clean-up attempt:”

She was not on a teleprompter. She was not hiding behind a press release or a surrogate. It was Harris being confronted by a radical pro-Hamas group asking her to consider an arms embargo on Israel. When confronted with radicals in her face, she said she’s open to it.

This is not the first time this has happened. Flashback: September 2021. Harris visits a school, and a kid goes off about Israel. Her response? “Your truth cannot be suppressed, and it must be heard.”

* * * * * * * *

They were her words — not a carefully crafted statement or post on X by a surrogate. It has happened before. They reinforce what we’ve seen for months as Harris became much more publicly hostile to Israel than Biden.

Only Kamala Harris can speak to what she said. Not Phil Gordon. Not a Jewish liaison. Not a communications director. Kamala Harris. Until she stands for a press conference and takes questions on it, her words in Michigan stand — no one else’s.

It’s impossible to imagine this headline from CNN if the parties were reversed:

Buried lede: Replacement for Democrat presidential candidate who can’t get through softball interviews yet another presidential candidate who can’t get through softball interviews!

And as Jim Treacher has said:

UPDATE: Note that Harris’s strategy is working for her so far. Philip Klein writes that “The Coddling of Kamala Is Taking Left-Wing Bias to a New Stratosphere,” adding that “I was a conservative journalist during the Obama era, and I have to say, even he had periods of negative coverage. I cannot recall anything like what we are now witnessing:”

Politico’s Playbook has a story out today, titled “Why Harris Isn’t Taking Questions,” that once again is a meta-analysis of how amazing her campaign is and how there’s no sense in messing with a winning streak. It notes that she has been informally chatting with reporters on her plane off the record, which, Dave Weigel surmises, is why we haven’t been hearing more complaints about access. This makes campaign reporters look even worse. Essentially, it means that access is all about their own insecurities rather than about actually doing their jobs and informing the public by asking a candidate for the presidency to answer challenging questions about her positions on important issues.

Perhaps the most damning indictment of the media comes from the Harris campaign itself.

“What is the incentive for her [to take more questions]?” Politico quotes somebody close to the campaign as saying. “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out.”

Exactly. If you can get away with scripted events and the media are happily behaving as a mere extension of your public-relations team, why bother?

As Treacher wrote today, the MSM side of the DNC-MSM are happy to go along with their folie à deux. “Nobody wants to be the reporter who gave us more President Trump. That’s all it is. They don’t care that we know they’re lying. Some of them, I suspect, actually enjoy that part. Anything that makes your enemy angry is good, and lying to them works every time.”

THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Pro-Israel group struggling to gain permit to rally at DNC — while pro-Palestinian groups got green light.

PELOSI ON BIDEN: ‘Never been that impressed with his political operation.’

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she was long dissatisfied with President Joe Biden’s campaign before he dropped out — not to mention his prospects for winning in November.

“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she told The New Yorker in an interview published Thursday. “They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The President has to make the decision for that to happen.”

In her interview, the 84-year-old former speaker signaled her personal frustration with the strength of Biden’s campaign operation, which she suggested was not up to the task of beating former President Donald Trump despite doing so successfully in 2020. And she reiterated her public stance that the president’s decision to get out of the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement at the top of the ticket was Biden’s and Biden’s alone.

While Pelosi privately voiced concerns to Biden about the dire polling of June and July which suggested a widening battleground map, she has only just begun to publicly reflect on her view that the Biden campaign was not in a winning position. The San Francisco Democrat was still hesitant to admit playing a singular role in the push to bring Biden down.

“I really wanted him to make a decision for a better campaign, because they were not facing the fact of what was happening,” Pelosi said after praising Biden’s accomplishments. “We couldn’t see it go down the drain, because Trump was going to be president and then he was going to take the House. Imagine! Imagine how that would be! Well, we don’t have to imagine. We saw.”

Yes, prior to 2020, we saw the booming stock market, low inflation, and low unemployment. Can’t have that! But perhaps the real buried lede here is that New Yorker proved it’s actually possible to have blue-on-blue journalism:

Because, ordinarily both sides of the equation are perfectly comfortable with calculated silence:

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Why Wasn’t ‘Scranton Joe’ at the Harris-Walz Launch Rally?

Democrats packed into Temple University’s Liacouras Center in Philadelphia for the new Democratic ticket’s first rally. Earlier that morning, news broke that Vice President Kamala Harris had picked Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. The choice simultaneously carried undertones of 2008, when the younger Barack Obama chose an older, white, generic politician in Senator Joe Biden, and 2016, when Hillary Clinton picked the low-name-ID Senator Tim Kaine to appear moderate. Notably absent from this rally, however, was the now-President Joe Biden, known for playing up his Pennsylvania roots.

Why wasn’t Joe there? Because it very likely wasn’t his decision to voluntarily pass the baton, and because of intense fears there would be a moment like this, as Jim Treacher writes:

CBS “journalist”: Are you confident that there will be a peaceful transfer of power, January 2025?

Joe: If Trump wins, no, I’m not confident at all. [EXCRUCIATING PAUSE AS HE REALIZES WHAT HE JUST SAID IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE WORLD] I mean, if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all.

Oh. Whew!

Good thing he remembered the difference between “win” and “lose.” A lot of people get those two things mixed up, right?

His initial thought was: “If Trump wins, we riot.” Which is what happened in 2016. But then he realized he’s not supposed to say that out loud.

It’s especially galling, given the past four years of outright lies about Biden’s senility. If he hadn’t botched that debate so badly, all these “journalists” and their fellow Democrats would still be lying to you.

“He’s as sharp as ever, we can barely keep up with him,” etc.

It’s 89 days until the election, and they just need to keep the old man breathing. And keep Kamala and her new running mate away from pesky reporters.

Can Kamala & Co. run out the clock by staying silent? Possibly, given that anything Trump says in a press conference will be dissected for auras and penumbras of partying like it’s 1939: Daily Show Claims Trump Is Invoking Themes From Mein Kampf.

RIP, MATE: Jack Karlson, Mr. “Democracy Manifest” is off to a succulent Chinese meal in the sky:

Mr. Democracy Manifest, the Australian man whose 1991 arrest went viral around the world, has died. Jack Karlson was 82 pic.twitter.com/JCpdAqcQmT

— BNO News (@BNONews) August 7, 2024

Background at Wikipedia, and an update on Karlson’s life in this recent Australian TV clip:

JON GABRIEL: Journalists: Heroes in Their Own Minds.

Sometimes, a selfie is worth a thousand words. CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta, the definition of journalistic self-regard, posted a photo to Twitter midway through the Trump presidency. Taken just before his 2018 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Acosta stares longingly into his Broadway-style lighted mirror, grasping a director’s chair emblazoned with the show’s logo. His reflection gazes into the camera’s eye revealing his bottomless well of self-satisfaction, insolence, and unearned pride. An open box of Zantac sits on the vanity.

The image was widely mocked across social media, much to the shock of the D.C. press corps. That picture revealed far more than the flaws of one spotlight-hogging reporter. It laid the soul of modern political journalism bare: the media’s supercilious id and ego, perfectly framed in an ignorant instant. Acosta quickly turned into a lightning rod, getting banished from the White House after a set of tedious stunts and histrionic hatred for the president of the United States. Yet he is far from the only Narcissus on the Potomac. The legacy media’s love for itself is topped only by its contempt for its audience.

Read the whole thing, which is an except from Against the Corporate Media, due out next month.

STOLEN VALOR: Tim Walz launched political career on false claim as combat veteran in the War on Terror.

UPDATE: Walz Falsely Claimed He Served in Afghanistan. When a Local Vet Called Him Out, His Office Did Nothing. Walz launched his first congressional campaign as ‘a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom.’

FLASHBACK: Why would anyone need to lie about having been in Vietnam? “O,the stained souls, the small-hours doubts, the troubled manhood of so many American men who didn’t go to Vietnam when they could have — the strange guilt they seem to feel when they confront Vietnam veterans. Strange: There were some cheaters and liars, but all that most of them did was exercise their legal rights, in the manner of Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut attorney general and Democratic Senate candidate — five deferments, then a safe stateside slot in the Marine reserves…Harvard and Yale and social connections are nice, but at 3 o’clock in the morning you find yourself outranked by high school dropouts whose names are on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial. Not in the eyes of the world, but in your own eyes. What a withering stare it must be for some men, that they’ll shame themselves far worse than they were shamed before, by telling a lie.”

MORE:

STOLEN VALOR gets worse for Kamala Harris’ VP pick…

Here is @Tim_Walz on CSPAN back in 2007 on his military service:

“𝐈 𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝟐𝟒 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐆𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐝, 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐟𝐮𝐥𝐥-𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞. 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐦𝐚𝐧.

𝐈… pic.twitter.com/j4JlWT5B1O

— Kylie Jane Kremer (@KylieJaneKremer) August 7, 2024

UPDATE (10:40 PM):

🚨Just in: A Video from 2009 shows a veteran confronting Tim Walz’s staff over claims that he served in Afghanistan. The veteran said Walz could go to jail for violating the Stolen Valor Act of 2006 for claiming to have served in Afghanistan when he didn’tpic.twitter.com/LdvtHJ5FnQ

— The Calvin Coolidge Project (@TheCalvinCooli1) August 8, 2024