FACT CHECK: Did Trump Call Baltimore ‘Nothing But a Home For Rats?’

ROGER L. SIMON IS NOW REVIEWING BOOKS, TOO: Trumping Obama: A Must-Have Book for the 2020 Election.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Here’s the book link.

NICE: U.S. Private Employers Added 156,000 Jobs in July, More Than Expected, ADP Says.

OH: False Jim Jordan Quote Goes Viral After Fooling Prominent Liberals.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Dem. Debate Had Fairy Tale Economics, Dark Psychic Forces. “Keep in mind that the Democrat primary universe is not the general election universe. These wacky policies are not going to play in the general election. How will the chosen stooge walk this crap back once they have to address the public? Taking people’s health care away in favor of a Veterans Administration-like system run by the post office is not appealing ( 90% have healthcare coverage, by the way.) The tax cuts, the ones the media has tricked people into thinking only went to the rich, will disappear along with your 401k invested in the stock market. The green new deal will cost a household $70K in the first year. But any argument against these policies are dismissed as Republican talking points. Do people hate Trump more than they want to see these crazy policies? I guess we will find out.”

CHINA CLAIMS A LOT OF THINGS: China claims most Muslim detainees have been released from Xinjiang camps.

HMM: Suburban women recoil as Trump dives into racial politics.

“I just don’t like the way he talks about other people,” Evans, a 79-year-old retired data entry supervisor, said recently as she walked through a shopping mall in Brookfield, Wisconsin, days after Trump fired off a racist tweet at Democratic congresswomen.

The president’s recent return to racial politics may be aimed at rallying his base of white working-class voters across rural America. But the risks of the strategy are glaring in conversations with women like Evans.

Many professional, suburban women — a critical voting bloc in the 2020 election — recoil at the abrasive, divisive rhetoric, exposing the president to a potential wave of opposition in key battlegrounds across the country.

In more than three dozen interviews by The Associated Press with women in critical suburbs, nearly all expressed dismay — or worse — at Trump’s racially polarizing insults and what was often described as unpresidential treatment of people. Even some who gave Trump credit for the economy or backed his crackdown on immigration acknowledged they were troubled or uncomfortable lining up behind the president.

This is more anecdata than actual data, but definitely keep an eye on suburban women as the election draws closer. This particular demo is the primary reason I’m not getting cocky.

NEWS YOU CAN USE? Everything We Know About the Air Force’s Secret X-37B Spaceplane.

The X-37B is so secretive, maybe they should have headlined it with “Everything We THINK We Know…”

MARK LEVIN: ‘Democrats must defend each other’ on Baltimore because they’re destroying America’s cities.

“The fact of the matter is the Democrats must defend each other in their handling of these various metropolitan areas, because these various metropolitan areas have been in control of the Democrat Party for half a century or more,” Levin explained. “In the case of Baltimore, since the 1940s.”

“And they are unraveling, the civil societies are collapsing,” Levin continued of Democrat-run major cities. “They attack their own police forces. They appoint liberal activist judges. They keep raising taxes. They keep pushing out individuals who pay taxes. And so you have the decline — severe decline — of living standards in these communities. Not because of race, not because of the federal government, not because of rich people: Because of the Democrat Party and those who run these cities.”

Levin went on to point out that “Baltimore’s not alone” and mentioned the problems of Democrat-run cities Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. “Who runs these cities? Republicans don’t run these cities. Democrats run these cities.”

Democrats defend these lousy results because they’re getting exactly what they want: A landed (er… condo’d?) gentry lording over the dependent masses. Middle-class flight is a feature, not a bug.

AND NOW WE KNOW WHY SHE PERSISTED: The Fix Was in from the Start for Hillarys ‘Exoneration,’ Immunity Agreements with Aides Show.

JUST OUT FROM PJMEDIA’S OWN MATT MARGOLIS: Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy.

AS A MATTER OF FACT I am drunkblogging tonight’s Democratic nomination debate.

THAT WOULD BE NICE: Ted Cruz Advocates Small Tax Change That Could Create 20K Jobs.

TURNS OUT, TWITTER IS A TERRIBLE BAROMETER OF REAL-WORLD POPULARITY: The Twitter Primary Revisited for July 2019.

EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL: NBA Teams Phasing Out All-Female Dance Squads Thanks to the #MeToo Movement.

MUST-SEE TV: ‘The Squad’ Campaign Ad for Trump Hits Democrats Where it Hurts. Good Times.

OF COURSE SHE DID: Ilhan Omar shares tweet mocking violence against GOP senator.

ALLIES: Erdogan: ‘Whoever Is On the Side of Israel…We Are Against Them.’

HEH: In Week 1, Boris Johnson Turns His Pursuit Of Brexit Into ‘Game Of Thrones.’

It started with a “Wednesday massacre” of the Cabinet established under former prime minister Theresa May. On July 24, the same day Johnson officially became the new resident of No. 10 Downing St., he sacked 11 ministers in an hour, including the nine who backed his opponent, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, for the PM job. Six other ministers, including Hunt, resigned.

Observers called Johnson’s move the “bloodiest cabinet reshuffle in modern history.” Johnson’s friend Nigel Evans referred to it as “a summer’s day massacre.” British media gave Johnson a new nickname: the Godfather.

Then there was a class reunion of Brexiteers. Johnson appointed Dominic Cummings, the chief political strategist of Brexit in 2016, to be his senior adviser. U.K. liberal media called Cummings a “master of dark arts” and blamed his messaging for successfully convincing a slight majority of Britons to vote “leave” from the European Union in 2016.

Besides getting Cummings on his side, Johnson organized a war Cabinet of six senior ministers who all support a “no-deal” Brexit.

Johnson is merely pursuing Brexit as though he means to obtain it, which means getting rid of Theresa May’s deadwood.

MARK ELLIS: Don’t Get Cocky, But Things Look Good for Trump.

AND THIS TIME IT WILL BE DIFFERENT: I Played Trump in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Debate Prep. Here’s What It Takes to Beat Him.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: How Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden plans to increase Social Security benefits.

Former vice president Joe Biden, who is currently leading among Democratic candidates in the polls, wants to make Social Security solvent.

The presidential hopeful also wants to boost benefits for retirees, particularly those who have been receiving checks for more than 20 years, had their spouse die or are living close to the poverty line.

Biden joins other Democratic candidates who are also calling for expansion of the program. Those proposals should challenge Republicans to come up with their own plan, according to one advocate.

So the plan is to spend Social Security into solvency.

WOW: IBM Just Made its Cancer-Fighting AI Projects Open-Source. “The first, PaccMann, uses deep learning algorithms to predict whether compounds will be viable anticancer drugs, taking some of the expensive guesswork out of pharmaceutical development, according to the press release. Then there’s INtERAcT, which automatically parses medical journals for important updates in the field, and PIMKL, which helps doctors provide tailor-fit care based on individual patients’ needs.”

CHANGE: Nashville’s Next Mayor May Be a Black Conservative Woman.

The election is being shaken up by Carol Swain, a woman who is – of all things in traditionally Democratic Nashville, a blue stronghold in a red state – a no-holds-barred black, Christian Republican conservative.

Swain’s vitae resembles neurosurgeon/cabinet member Ben Carson’s, but is in some ways more extraordinary. She was one of twelve children born in rural Virginia in 1954, growing up in a shack without running water. Her mother, a victim of infantile paralysis who never made it out of high school, was physically abused by her stepfather. Her own father ended his education at third grade. Carol herself, shoeless and unable to attend on snow days, did not finish high school either. She dropped out and married at sixteen to have three children, one of whom died of sudden infant death syndrome. Five years later, she was divorced and tried to commit suicide.

But then everything slowly changed. In a remarkable bootstrap story she would likely ascribe to her faith, Swain earned her GED while working as a cashier at McDonald’s, then attended, in succession, Virginia Western Community College, Roanoke College (BA), Virginia Tech (MA), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (PhD) and Yale (MLS).

But wait, as they say, there’s more.

Good stuff from Roger L. Simon. You’ll want to click over for the rest of the story.

BLUE ON BLUE: ‘Complete Chaos’: Top Democrat Staffer Ousted Amid Complaints DCCC Is Too White.