BILL WHITTLE: How to beat Harris, Part 2: POLLS.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: 200 GOP Losers Write Another One of Those Election Letters Lying About Trump.

THEY’VE BEEN THAT WAY FOR A LONG TIME:

RFK JR: "They got rid of the primaries because they didn't trust the people. They then hand-picked Vice President Harris with no election because they didn't trust the people.. They're the party now of censorship." pic.twitter.com/eadCzMhbQ9

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 27, 2024

BREAKING: Jack Smith Brings New Indictment Against Trump.

SCOTT PINSKER: The Power of Association: What the RFK Jr. Endorsement Means to the Trump Campaign.

POLARIS DAWN: One of the most adventurous human spaceflights since Apollo may launch tonight.

During the initial hours of the spaceflight, the crew will seek to fly in a highly elliptical orbit, reaching an altitude as high as 1,400 km (870 miles) above the planet’s surface. This will be the highest Earth-orbit mission ever flown by humans and the farthest any person has flown from Earth since the Apollo Moon landings more than half a century ago. This will expose the crew to a not insignificant amount of radiation, and they will collect biological data to assess harms.

The Resilience spacecraft will then descend toward a more circular orbit about 700 km above the Earth’s surface. Assuming a launch on Tuesday, the crew will don four spacesuits on Friday and open the hatch to the vacuum of space. Then Isaacman, followed by mission specialist Sarah Gillis, will each briefly climb out of the spacecraft into space.

Isaacman’s interest in performing the first private spacewalk accelerated, by years, SpaceX’s development of these spacesuits. This really is just the first generation of the suit, and SpaceX is likely to continue iterating toward a spacesuit that has its own portable life support system (PLSS). This is the “backpack” on a traditional spacesuit that allows NASA astronauts to perform spacewalks untethered to the International Space Station.

The general idea is that, as the Starship vehicle makes the surface of the Moon and eventually Mars more accessible to more people, future generations of these lower-cost spacesuits will enable exploration and settlement. That journey, in some sense, begins with this mission’s brief spacewalks, with Isaacman and Gillis tethered to the Dragon vehicle for life support.

Godspeed…

WELCOME HOME: Hostage Taken on October 7 Freed by Israel in ‘Complex’ Military Operation.

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Germany’s business climate hits crisis-like levels as the DAX falters.

This decline was driven by deteriorating current business conditions and increasingly pessimistic future outlooks.

“The German economy is increasingly falling into crisis,” remarked Clemens Fuest, President of the ifo Institute.

Manufacturers reported significantly lower satisfaction with the present situation, while service-oriented businesses expressed growing scepticism about the future. Manufacturing sentiment fell to its lowest since early 2020, and the services sector hit its lowest point since February 2024.

Recent private sector surveys also indicated a downturn in August, with employment shrinking at the fastest rate in four years.

While that Euronews report didn’t mention energy prices, this story from like week put them front and center: High energy prices are forcing German manufacturers to consider cutting production.

I BELIEVE THEM:

These images were reportedly taken inside @MMSDschools in Wisconsin.

This school is trying to destroy "heteronormative thinking" and replace it with a "queer affirming network?"

When they say they're coming for your kids, believe them. pic.twitter.com/gbrluI1v4J

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 26, 2024

WELL, HE’S RIGHT: Trump Honors Kabul Victims, Blames Biden-Harris.

“ESCALATION MANAGEMENT” IS BUREAUCRATESE FOR “LOSE ANOTHER WAR”:

According to the "escalation managers" in Washington and Berlin, allowing Ukraine to strike the airfields that launched this attack with Western weapons would be considered "unacceptable escalation", but allowing Russia to destroy this dam and flood millions of people is not. https://t.co/t3mt5JvInJ

— Jimmy Rushton (@JimmySecUK) August 26, 2024

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS: Starbucks Has a Problem but I Can Deliver the Solution in 30 Minutes or It’s Free.

CARING: Biden and Harris ‘Never Once Reached Out’ to Relatives of Soldiers Killed in Bungled Afghanistan Withdrawal, Families Say. “They just want to pretend it didn’t happen.”

BRIBES AND THEFT ARE THEIR BEST TOOLS: Democrats Offer Free Money to Illegal Aliens to Buy Houses — and an Election.

GLENN ALREADY LINKED TO JOHN SCHINDLER’S EXCELLENT ARTICLE, “Who Really Is Barack Obama?” but one more thing needs to be said.

Schindler devoted more than 3,500 exhaustively researched words trying to answer the headline question. But he was forced to repeat it at the end, “I ask again: Who really is Barack Obama?”

After all these years — and all that damage — he remains something of a cipher. That’s no accident.

THE CIPHER: A Funny Thing Happened When Don Lemon Went Looking for Kamala Harris Voters…

IT IS EPIC: Trump Puts Out New Epic Ad With Kamala Harris Debating…Kamala Harris.

This brutal ad against Kamala Harris is going up in the swing states.

Extremely effective. pic.twitter.com/6xTtEAkotG

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 26, 2024

Related: That Trump Fellow Who’s Been President the Last Four Years Sounds AWFUL.

DON’T GET COCKY: Here’s Why Dem Pollsters Are Panicking About Kamala Harris’s Campaign. “‘Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,’ Chauncey McLean, the president of Future Forward, said.”

“CONSPIRACY THEORY” NOW JUST MEANS “THREE WEEKS AHEAD OF THE NEWS CYCLE”:

Looks like Mark Zuckerberg has joined the ranks of the crazed conspiracy theorists who claim that the Biden administration pressured Facebook to censor dissent during Covid.

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) August 27, 2024

WELL, YES: Kamala Harris’s media gambit is working.

Vice President Kamala Harris has done an impressive job lowering the bar on the question of how she will communicate her views to voters. As you know, Harris has not done an interview since a group of backroom Democratic Party insiders muscled President Joe Biden out of the race on July 21, leading to Harris’s instant elevation to Democratic nominee the next day. Yes, she has taken a few softball questions from her traveling press corps but nothing of any consequence. Needless to say, Harris has not done a news conference to take questions from reporters over an extended period of time.

Harris is avoiding the press for two reasons. One, she’s not a very good extemporaneous speaker, and a news conference would just be an opportunity to create problems for herself. Two, the press is doing her work for her, portraying her as ‘moving to the center’ based on the word of anonymous aides, not Harris herself.

Mostly it’s working (to the extent it can work with a candidate as weak as Harris) because the press — if we can still call it that — is deeply uninterested in doing their purported job and heavily invested in pushing radical candidates into positions of power.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Trump Campaign CANNOT Cave to Harris’s Panicky Debate Demands. “Harris’s people have to be terrified. This sham of a campaign has been conducted in a media cocoon that’s protected Harris. A debate will be the first time that she’s really exposed, even with the ABC hacks running interference for her. The potential for a catastrophic embarrassment with Harris off-script is just as great as it was with Biden, but she doesn’t have the old and tired excuse to fall back on.”

DECOUPLING: IBM Pulls Research Operations Out of China, Lays Off 1,000 Employees. “IBM is planning to hire R&D staff in other locations, like India, according to employees familiar with the plans.”

THE GREAT REPLACEMENT: Taxpayer-Funded Org Giving Only Migrants Home Down Payments.

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT: China Gains Secret Access to Nvdia Microchips by Renting Computers. “The buyers and sellers of computing power and the middlemen connecting them aren’t breaking any laws, lawyers familiar with U.S. sanctions say. Washington has targeted exports of advanced chips, equipment and technology, but cloud companies say the export rules don’t restrict Chinese companies or their foreign affiliates from accessing U.S. cloud services using Nvidia chips.”

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Wargaming the Electoral College: The Spoiler That Wasn’t.

The Polymarket results are closely in line with various polls (more on those in a moment) supposedly showing that Harris had opened things up in the Southwest (Ariz. and Nev.), shored things up in the Upper Midwest (Mich. and Wisc.), and weakened Trump slightly in the South (Ga. and N.C.).

The net result is a 251-251 tie (including leaners) with Pennsylvania determining the winner. The numbers and the swing states haven’t changed that much but Harris has more routes to victory than Biden had, and Trump has fewer than he had against Biden.

About those polls…

Stephen Kruiser and I were having this conversation earlier today on our Five O’Clock Somewhere video live chat that pollsters seem to be oversampling Democrats as part of the Uniparty push to make Harris seem inevitable.

That said, she is likely doing better than Biden was doing against Trump, if only because she doesn’t look and sound like she has one foot in the grave. That alone was probably enough to win back some stragglers.

Enter one Robert F. Kennedy Jr as he (mostly) exits the race.

Much more at the link.