AND BY “INTERACTED,” HE MEANS “GOT IT ON:” Geneticist Joshua Akey states that modern humans and Neanderthals interacted for a period of 200,000 years.
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
July 15, 2024
“A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen. They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture.” — Donald Trump
Whether you love him, hate him, or have wearily resigned yourself to him, you gotta admit he’s funny.
Did I say heh? Yes, yes I did.
LESSONS LEARNED: First of all, the Secret Service is utterly incompetent.
TRUMP’S BIG MO:
Everything really is going Donald Trump’s way in the six weeks since his conviction on May 30. Trump pulled in a vast fundraising haul after the conviction, jumping ahead for the first time in the campaign cash race while his conviction barely dented his standing in the polls. The intermediate appeals court in Georgia issued a stay order halting Fani Willis’s prosecution of Trump. The Supreme Court took two big bites out of Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump in D.C., with an immunity ruling and a decision on the obstruction-of-a-proceeding statute that will both require further, time-consuming litigation to see how they have narrowed the case. Acting Justice Juan Merchan delayed Trump’s state-court sentencing in New York from mid July to mid September in order to consider whether Trump’s conviction violated his immunity from having evidence of official acts introduced at his trial. His opponent melted down so badly in their first debate that Joe Biden is still fending off calls to drop out of the race, and has reportedly seen his fundraising dry to a trickle with big donors. Then, Trump survived an assassination attempt and emerged looking vigorous and defiant. He will probably raise another mountain of cash after the shooting in Butler, Pa., which left a flustered Biden scrambling to pause his attack ads and reconsider the vitriol of his attacks on Trump. MSNBC even sidelined Morning Joe for the day out of fear of going overboard against Trump. And now, rolling into today’s curtain-opening of the Republican convention and announcement of Trump’s running mate, Judge Aileen Cannon has thrown out what once seemed the strongest of the cases against the former president: the retention of boxes of classified and sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago after Trump left office.
Now add the Vance selection and Trump is looking dynamic. But wait, there’s more.
Earlier today, Trump called for RFK to get Secret Service protection, and a friend messaged me: “Haha, when they do that, our crazy orange former president official becomes shadow chief executive. Making the common sense calls the Biden admin can’t quite manage.”
And later today, they did that, with Sec. Mayorkas announcing that RFK will get Secret Service protection. To which my friend comments: “Prediction: Here through Jan 20 will be the first six months of the second Trump admin.”
The dynamism is all on one side here.
SO, J.D. VANCE. I had told Helen that I thought the assassination attempt would boost his chances. With Trump feeling — literally — the wind of mortality on his neck, he’s going to want a backup who’ll carry the MAGA flame, not some milquetoast who might “balance the ticket” but who wouldn’t be worth it if he/she stepped into Trump’s shoes. Plus at best Trump can only serve one term; he wants someone who might follow him in office and carry the MAGA vision forward.
I’m skeptical that VP candidates make that big a difference, but I think it means something that Vance will add non-geriatric balance to the ballot this time around.
I should say that I’ve known Vance for a while, to a small degree. Back when he was a literary celebrity, not a political one, he passed through Knoxville a couple of times and we had drinks and lunch, once with his family. I quite like him and think he’s sincerely motivated to make things better. I’ve only heard from him a couple of times since he became a Senator, but to his credit neither involved him asking me for money, which is an accomplishment for a Senator . . .
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Carry Laws Don’t Increase Gun Theft or Gun Crimes.
BRIAN WANG: Tesla FSD Profits Will Explode. “This is hugely significant because each full purchase of FSD is the profit of a car. You buy a Model Y for $40,000 and Tesla gets $8000 of profit. Tesla sells FSD for about $8000 and that is the profit of a car.”
HMM: Weight-loss jabs linked to lower cancer risk compared with insulin—new study. There seem to be a lot of positive studies coming out lately about these drugs.
COMMON SENSE:
BREAKING: Donald Trump calls for Robert F. Kennedy Jr to receive Secret Service pic.twitter.com/vRvxTzghvX
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) July 15, 2024
UPDATE: A friend sends: “Haha, when they do that, our crazy orange former president official becomes shadow chief executive. Making the common sense calls the Biden admin can’t quite manage.”
MICHAEL WALSH: Trump, Biden, and the Shame of the Corporate Media.
I don’t need to explain what has just happened to you. We will be talking about it for a long time to come. The assassination attempt on Trump is of such enormity — a man is dead, and others are injured — that we will be dealing with its ramifications for months if not years. It is frankly a miracle that Trump survived — a bullet grazed him, taking a piece of his right ear with it — and questions will immediately turn to how on earth the Secret Service could have allowed this to happen. . . .
But for now I want to offer a prayer for the dead and wounded, a sigh of relief that we have narrowly avoided a catastrophe that would have carried us full-scale into a grotesque replay of the worst of 1968, and . . . a genuinely heartfelt tip of the cap to Donald Trump, a man who actually rose to a truly terrible moment. Eight to ten shots ring out; Trump feels the upper lobe of his right ear get torn away by a bullet, the Secret Service rushes him as he gets down. There is chaos. There is terror. The immediate need is to get the former president — already wounded and bleeding — off the stage.
And then Donald Trump says “Wait, wait, wait.” And Trump reaches up over their protective shield to throw a set of fierce, proud fist-pumps in the air. Blood is streaking down the side of his head and on his arms. But he wants you to know he’s unbowed. Unintimidated. You come at the Don, you best not miss. The images are already iconic, from multiple angles. Trump, with his bloody fist raised in proud defiance of the Reaper and anyone else crazy enough to try and take him down, is going to become one of the most famous photographs in modern American political history — if you’re uncomfortable with that you best start adjusting to it.
Or maybe, like the “Falling Man” photo from 9/11, the media will disappear it.
JIM TREACHER: Maybe the Secret Service Isn’t a Vehicle for Female Empowerment.
“Well, you wouldn’t do any better under fire, Mr. Blogger!” You’re exactly right. Which is why I shouldn’t be in the Secret Service any more than they should.
Kimberly Cheatle, head of the Secret Service, got the publicity she wanted for hiring a bunch of women. Now she’s got a bunch of questions to answer.
How did this happen?
How did a guy with a rifle access a rooftop that close to his target?
Why didn’t agents listen to the attendees who spotted him first?
Why was one female agent heard screaming, “What are we doing? Where are we going?”
Why haven’t you cleaned out your desk yet?
That last question is the most important one. I sure wouldn’t want to trade places with Cheatle right now. Republicans hate her for letting this happen to Trump, and Democrats hate her for handing him the election.
The Secret Service has no plans to beef up security at the RNC in Milwaukee, saying: “We are confident in the plans we have.”
They shouldn’t be confident in anything right now. They’re not filming a promotional video with women in Kevlar vests walking in slow motion while contemporary R&B plays. They’re supposed to be protecting a presidential candidate, and they just failed utterly.
Yep.
PERCEPTION IS NOT REALITY: ‘Perceived’ racism in medicine isn’t the same as real bias, scholar says.
STANDING UP AGAINST RACISM AND BIGOTRY: Sullivan & Cromwell Will Use Background Checks To Weed Out Antisemitic Prospective Hires.
SALENA ZITO: Trump rewrites Republican convention speech to focus on unity not Biden.
Former President Donald Trump has completely rewritten his convention speech in light of the assassination attempt against him on Saturday and will call on Thursday for a new effort at national unity.
In an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner a day after being hit by a sniper’s bullet, Trump said he wanted to take advantage of a historic moment and draw the country together.
“The speech I was going to give on Thursday was going to be a humdinger,” he said, “Had this not happened, this would’ve been one of the most incredible speeches” aimed mostly at the policies of President Joe Biden. “Honestly, it’s going to be a whole different speech now.”
He has switched, he said, from planning to excite his voter base to one that demonstrates his belief that the attack on him at a rally in Pennsylvania had changed the election campaign entirely. Both Republicans and Democrats have acknowledged this in the aftermath of Saturday’s shocking incident.
Stay tuned.
Related (From Ed): ‘I Was Four Feet Away When I Heard the Bullets.’ A gunman tried to assassinate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Salena Zito was there.
Before the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, while questions raged about the health of President Joe Biden, officials downplayed the importance of the physical leader. White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters to look at the administration, not the man. “What we are saying,” she said, “is there are results, his record.” As my podcast partner Walter Kirn wrote, we were “being introduced to the idea that the presidency is a diffuse impersonal ‘office,’ and the bucks stops nowhere that is… conventionally identifiable.”
But we live in a physical world, and individuals still matter. Official actions betray this more than anything else. When a populist movement built on frustration over decades of misrule began having electoral success, they created a legend that the backlash was irrational and the fault of one Donald Trump, building him into a figure of colossal art, a super-Hitler. It became cliché that he was the embodiment of all evil and needed to be stopped “at all costs.” By late last year, mainstream press organizations were saying legal means had failed, and more or less openly calling for a truly final solution to the Trump problem.
Now he’s been shot, in an incident that’s left two dead. . . .
After the 2016 election, Trump began to be described as a new kind of American villain, someone not quite entitled to normal rights — the political equivalent of an “enemy combatant.” Weeks after inauguration, California congresswoman Maxine Waters blithely said Trump was guilty of “sex actions” and “collusion” described in the Steele dossier, and as for evidence, “We just have to… do the investigation and find it.”
Waters has always been on the edge of the credibility spectrum, but this chucking of the presumption of innocence raised few eyebrows, for that new reason: Because Trump. Fellow Californian Adam Schiff, held hearings on the Steele accusations without even attempting to verify them. There were widespread hysterical accusations of a capital crime — TREASON — after an anodyne meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The office of Trump’s lawyer was raided on a dubious pretext (leading to this year’s criminal prosecution), news that the FBI deployed informants in Trump’s 2016 campaign drew yawns, and no one fretted over lunatic character attacks on former Trump aide Carter Page, or the jailing of figures like George Papadopoulos who committed no real crime. Even Schiff’s attempt to resurrect the McCarthyite concept of “disloyalty to country” as a means of unseating Trump was received politely by media arbiters like Chuck Todd.
Most of the early madness surrounding Trump expressed itself as religious worship of special prosecutor Robert Mueller and his investigation. Solemn readings of the Mueller report by actors like John Lithgow and Annette Bening really happened. The failure of that Great Deliverance to come to pass seems to be when officials shifted their tone toward the current posture that Trump needs to be stopped “at all costs.”
Even at the cost of the government’s legitimacy. Maybe it’s not democracy they’re guarding. Maybe it never was.
In some ways, the surprising thing is that it has taken until July 2024, four months before the election, for someone to try to assassinate the once and probably future president. After all, since before Trump was elected in 2016, the Democrats and their poodles in the media, Hollywood and fetid corners of celebrity sweepstakes have been baying for Trump’s blood. Remember Kathy Griffin holding up a fake bloodied head of Trump in 2017? Remember the staging of Julius Caesar in which the title character, cut down by Brutus and the other assassins, is clearly a stand-in for Trump?
Perhaps the most pathetic element in the regime response to the attempt on Trump’s life has been the declaration, repeated ad nauseam, that the authorities were still searching for a motive. An FBI field agent in Pennsylvania parroted that stupidity. “We do not currently have a motive,” he said. Ditto the housebroken media. The shooter’s “motivations remain unknown,” bleated a characteristically malicious column in MSNBC.
I can help those claiming to be in the dark about the shooter’s motive. His motive was to kill Donald Trump. And why not? Leviathan has been waging war against Trump since before he was elected in 2016. Remember the Russian Collusion Hoax? That $40 million entertainment was fabricated by Hillary Clinton and her pals in the FBI and the intelligence services.
Remember the fake impeachments of Trump towards the end of his first term? They too were groundless. So are the multiple indictments that have been brought by the odiferous Merrick Garland and minions like Jack Smith and Alvin Bragg, not to mention swivel-eyed judges like Juan Merchan, Arthur Engoron and Tanya Chutkan.
That violent and ongoing tsunami of lawfare against Trump was meant to destroy him. Possibly it would bankrupt him — remember Engoron’s preposterous fine of nearly half a billion dollars? Maybe it would simply put him away in jail for a few decades. Or possibly the judges’ machinations and gag orders would simply prevent Trump from campaigning.
Is it any wonder that that the “woke” forces arrayed against Trump have moved on to something more kinetic?
I doubt we’ll hear the term “stochastic terrorism” from the left for a while.
The funny thing is that Republicans want Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to stay alive and running.
ICYMI:
Party That Called Trump 'Hitler' For 8 Years Shocked As Someone Tries To Assassinate Him https://t.co/9zTv1SsnMc pic.twitter.com/Wr5BNapizb
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) July 13, 2024
July 14, 2024
CUI BONO? VANTAGGI BIDEN. CBS’s Nancy Cordes Echoes White House ‘Whew, Sure Glad the Focus Shifted Away.’ “CBS’s coverage of the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump has been awful throughout, but Chief White Correspondent Nancy Cordes may have just plumbed a new low. Today, there was a brief pause in the media’s ongoing lecture about ‘tone’ and ‘rhetoric’. Watch as CBS’s Nancy Cordes channeled the Biden campaign’s relief at the shift in campaign focus- away from discussions about Biden’s cognitive decline and questions of his continued viability, either as a candidate or as president.”