BEZOS’S EFFORT TO ADD SOME BALANCE IS OFF TO A SLOW START: WashPost Pays to Promote Anti-Trump Stories. “The Washington Post this week ‘aggressively ramped up’ its paid advertising on social media platforms to boost stories criticizing former President Donald Trump after the backlash over owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to kill an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.”
November 1, 2024
ARE THERE ANY INSTITUTIONS THAT STILL GIVE A DAMN ABOUT THEIR REPUTATION? Nate Silver Claims Pollsters are ‘Putting Their Finger on the Scale’ to Make it Appear the Race is Close.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:
Exclusive footage obtained by The Free Press shows LA teachers discussing how to organize their students for the pro-Palestine cause.
“Some of the things we can do as teachers is to organize. We just have to be intelligent on how we do that….We have to know that Zionists and… pic.twitter.com/RJgqXCXC9k
— The Free Press (@TheFP) October 31, 2024
JIM GERAGHTY: Oh, Sure, Now the Harris Campaign Needs Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.
Hey, remember when CNN headlines were declaring, “Walz could help Harris shore up the ‘blue wall’ on the way to the White House”?
Is he?
I’ll take this ad as a quiet admission that when it comes to winning Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, Shapiro is a far more useful asset than Walz. And as we approach Election Day, it becomes increasingly clear that Walz, self-described “knucklehead,’’ doesn’t bring as much to the table as Democrats believed in those heady days of summer. As noted yesterday, polling indicates Harris is on pace to win Minnesota by a slightly narrower margin than Joe Biden won the state in 2020. Never mind helping Harris in the critical blue-wall states; there’s not much evidence that Walz has helped her at all in his home state.
(Despite the protests from Eric Holder, it is clear that the vetting process he ran for Harris, digging into the background of her running mate options, was nowhere near thorough enough.)
You could see it in the online discourse and the Saturday Night Live sketch – Democrats were disappointed with Walz’s performance in the debate with J.D. Vance. He doesn’t know what a venture capitalist does, he thinks the First Amendment doesn’t cover hate speech, he goes rogue and declares America has to get rid of the Electoral College… Walz isn’t a strength you can put front and center in campaign ads, he’s a liability you try to hide until Election Day.
The guy who was supposed to be this big help with rural and blue-collar Americans is giving his closing message on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the friendliest of urban metropolitan venues. Walz is campaigning in downtown Detroit today, and then Flint and Traverse City.
Let’s face it though, as a Certified Minnesota Football Genius, the man is the second coming of Bud Grant: ‘Coach’ Tim Walz Has Another Football Lingo Issue, Coach and Sen. Tommy Tuberville Helps Out.
Hey, anybody who “can run a mean pick-6” can call it anything he wants!
Fortunately, America’s Newspeak of Dictionary speaks jive Walz:
Far more serious than Walz’s football malapropisms is what his mouthpiece is saying: Tim Walz ‘Says’ He Wants to Destroy America. “Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz ‘says’ he wants to destroy America — not expressly; nonetheless with perfect clarity. Walz’s mouthpiece and education guru, Brian Lozenski, actually did say it expressly. In the embedded video, Lozenski, whom Walz appointed to craft an “ethnic studies” curriculum for Minnesota children, calls for the overthrow of the United States. (Ethnic Studies, despite its harmless sounding name, is founded on Critical Race Theory and, like CRT, is aimed at overthrowing America.)”
Incidentally, unlike Trump and Vance, why hasn’t Walz gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast?
But why would anyone think that Walz is “too weird?”
THE BROOKS BROTHERS RIOT, THE NEXT GENERATION:
Does Brooks Brothers or Paul Stuart make the really authentic Proud Boys neckties?
(Classical reference in headline.)
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: This Is Domino’s Pizza, Please State the Nature of Your Emergency. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news and this week we have one quick-witted assault victim, $100,000 worth of stolen bacon, and Tennessee Man using the wrong kind of donuts to trick the police.”
IT’S COME TO THIS:
Todd writes, “the campaign to convince the world that all media should be assumed to be biased politically unless proved otherwise.” Well, yes. As long as the journalist discloses where his bias lies, this isn’t a problem. Or as Sean Davis wrote in 2015: Sorry, Chuck Todd, But Reporters Are Not The Referees Of Politics.
And that fact is exactly why Chuck Todd so desperately wants to be viewed as a referee, rather than an observer who just happens to have a camera in front of him and a media operation behind him. He wants you to think he’s the one calling balls and strikes. He wants you to think he’s the expert on the rules. He wants to be the one to tell you what’s out of bounds and what isn’t. And the reason he wants that is because he, like so many other reporters (he is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only political reporter to have significant ties to the Democratic Party), has skin in the game.
Todd worked for the presidential campaign of former Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. His wife is a long-time Democratic campaign consultant. They very clearly have skin in the game. Major League Baseball would never hire a George Steinbrenner staffer to stand behind the plate for a Yankees game against the Red Sox. It would be absurd to suggest that an arrangement like that would be appropriate. Fans would be outraged. But Todd would have you believe that this would not just be totally kosher, but totally normal.
In the interest of full disclosure, I also have a political background. I was a congressional staffer for several Republicans. I worked on a Republican presidential campaign. There are two big differences between Todd and me, though: 1) I am completely up-front about my biases, my background, and my ideological and political preferences, and 2) I am under no delusion that I’m a neutral arbiter. When I make assertions, I do my absolute best to back them up with verifiable evidence. And I certainly do not make any claims that I’ve been bestowed (by whom, Chuck Todd never makes clear) with some sort of official role in determining who is following The Rules™ and who isn’t.
See how easy that is?
Note also that Todd is writing in the Atlantic, which after the Kevin Williamson debacle in 2018, has quite neatly identified its collective ideology.
THAT’S HOW IT GOES: AT&T praises itself after getting caught taking too much money from FCC program.
BUILT TO LAST: Voyager 1 Just Phoned Home From 24 Billion Kilometers Away On A Transmitter Not Used Since 1981.
On October 18, the spacecraft did not respond. Voyager 1 uses an X-band radio transmitter to communicate with the Deep Space Network. The mission team knows its spacecraft and worked out that the command might have triggered the fault protection system, leading to a lower rate of data transmission with a change to the signal from the X-band transmitter.
The team searched for that signal and were able to find it. The situation was a bit of a hiccup, but didn’t seem to cause any alarm. Not like last year, when the spacecraft started producing gibberish.
With that in mind, the team started to look deeper. Then, on October 19, in a concerning development, the signal stopped altogether. Luckily, Voyager 1’s onboard computer somehow found a solution – a truly left-field one.
“The flight team suspected that Voyager 1’s fault protection system was triggered twice more and that it turned off the X-band transmitter and switched to a second radio transmitter called the S-band,” NASA’s Tony Greicius writes in the Voyager Blog.
“While the S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it.”
The team has confirmed that the S-band transmitter is working well, even after all this time and at such an incredible distance. They are currently working to restore the spacecraft to its normal operations.
Parts of America still work — after almost 50 years and 15 billion miles.
GREAT MOMENTS IN INADVERTENT SELF-IDENTIFICATION: Massachusetts man arrested for allegedly painting swastika on Trump campaign sign.
A Cohasset man has been arrested for allegedly painting a swastika onto a Trump campaign sign sitting along a public road in town.
The defaced sign is the property of Kevin O’Donnell, the 77-year-old co-chair of the Republican Town Committee and a longstanding supporter of former President Donald Trump.
Police arrested 74-year-old Frederic Laidlaw, who was in Quincy district court on Thursday for arraignment on a felony charge of “defacement of property,” Cohasset Police Chief William Quigley said in a statement.
“Cohasset police allege that Laidlaw entered onto private property and painted a swastika on a political sign on Wednesday October 30th,” Quigley wrote.
O’Donnell told the Herald that the sign — which cost him about $200 — for the last three elections has been on land he owns next to busy Route 3A, with no previous problems.
He also said that he has to wonder if the person who decided to deface it even realizes the imagery they are conjuring when they use a symbol most closely associated with the Nazi government of Germany.
“It’s shocking, absolutely shocking,” he said. “Do they understand how many people died because of that ideology?”
Friend of Israel and proponent of less wars; Trump is the Worst. Hitler. Ever.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:
Monroe County District Attorney said the fraudulent voter registration forms were traced to FieldCorps whose clients included Biden-Harris, Mark Kelly and Arizona Democrats.
Calls to the number listed went unreturned and the FieldCorps website was mysteriously taken down. https://t.co/EhpDauPa8a pic.twitter.com/gzjojz01cL— ZitoSalena (@ZitoSalena) November 1, 2024
At least with Elon Musk owning X, these reports can’t get squashed any longer.
THE NEW SPACE RACE, PRIORITIES EDITION: NASA to restart Mentor-Protege program to help improve contractor diversity.
JIM TREACHER: Friday Pre-Election Grab Bag.
I haven’t seen Israel much in the news lately, probably because they’re winning the war they didn’t start. Journalists, and their fellow Democrats, really don’t like it when the Jews succeed.
Antisemitism in America is in full flourish after the October 7 attack. Just look at this crap:
If a Muslim got kicked out of a Jewish deli anywhere in America, it would be national news. But a Jew getting kicked out of a Muslim cafe for wearing a Star of David? The journos don’t care. They don’t consider it antisemitism unless it’s wearing a MAGA hat.
Meanwhile, an illegal alien Muslim terrorist just shot a Jew in Chicago while screaming “Allahu Akbar,” and public schoolteachers in Los Angeles are openly plotting to turn kids against Israel without getting fired.
Democrats still can’t shut up about what happened in Charlottesville seven years ago, yet all the antisemitism in 2024 is coming from their side.
It’s Charlottesvilles all the way down in Kamala and Joe’s America:
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: N.Y. doctors report first U.S. cases of sexually transmitted ringworm.
DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS: Texas Buys More Land To Build Border Wall. “Sometimes, if you want something done right, you just have to do it yourself. That’s Texas, faced with the lawbreaking refusal of the Biden-Harris Administration to secure the border. As such, they’re buying their own border land to build their own border wall.”
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Apple Watch SE (2nd Gen) [GPS 40mm] Smartwatch. #CommissionEarned I just bought this watch at the advice of my doctor to check my heart rate while exercising. So far it seems to be doing a good job and I like that I can choose the type of exercise I am doing like Barre, or Weight training and it will track calories and activity time as well.
NELLIE BOWLES: TGIF: We’re All Garbage.
The world is probably ending on Tuesday, as Democracy Dies in Darkness, so this might be the last TG ever written. Let’s make it count. Happy belated Halloween!
We’re all garbage: While Kamala Harris stood outside the White House to deliver her closing pitch to America, looking amazing and elegant in a bright white cowl neck (not sorry! She’s a 10!), Joe Biden made his own closing remarks. From a video call at the White House residence, he called Trump supporters feral trash rats. In Biden’s words: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.”
He was responding to a fairly offensive joke said at a Trump rally by a boorish comedian: “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” The crowd reaction was mixed to negative. And then Biden said that the only trash is Trumpers—it was like watching the Democrats be handed a gift from Team Trump only to watch them crumple it up and hand it back.
Right on cue, America’s reporters snapped into action to deny that Biden said exactly what Biden said. He didn’t mean Trump supporters were trash, he meant that they litter, said The Washington Post.
The White House press office slightly altered the transcript—a “breach of protocol and spoilation of transcript integrity,” according to the White House stenographers—making it seem like he was talking about the supporters’ rubbish, like “Hey, don’t forget your supporters’ garbage should be separated into plastic and paper,” and Politico ran cover. My only question is: Don’t mainstream reporters ever get tired of running interference for Joe and Kamala? Don’t they ever want to just relax, drop their shoulders, and write about the words they say out loud? You can have a hundred delicately placed apostrophes in that sentence; it won’t change the fact that Biden called Trumpers “garbage.”
Hugh Hewitt, long one of the calmest conservative talk radio hosts ever, finally loses it among the Post’s Democratic Party operatives with bylines: Hugh Hewitt quits Washington Post after storming off livestream talk over dispute with liberal columnists: ‘I won’t come back.’
🚨 GANGSTER!
Hugh Hewitt rips his earpiece out and walks off set LIVE on-air while calling the Washington Post an 'election ad' for Kamala. Hugh was enraged that the segment did not fairly report on Trump's election integrity victories
Then the entire broadcast IMPLODES
WATCH pic.twitter.com/DNnM0vVwmh
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 1, 2024
Over to you, Jeff; as Mark Hemingway tweets, “You can bet Bezos is going to see this. This is Exhibit A for the problems he’s been talking about.“
US JOBS GROWTH PLUNGES DAYS BEFORE ELECTION:
US hiring slowed significantly last month, in what marked the weakest jobs growth reported under President Joe Biden.
Friday’s downbeat employment update, released just days before the US election, revealed just 12,000 non-farming jobs were added in October, down from 223,000 a month earlier.
This marked the slowest rate of growth since late 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as analysts blamed the impact of hurricanes and strike action at Boeing.
While hiring slowed, America’s unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.1pc.
The closely watched report will be sure to draw scrutiny from both presidential candidates before next Thursday’s election, as Kamala Harris and Donald Trump battle to convince voters of their ability to improve the economy.
Not to mention, the media going all-in on attacking the Bad Orange Man, since they can’t use these dreadful numbers to prop up Kamala in the closing weekend: Deceptive Snakes at Kamala’s HQ Straight-Up Nuked for Editing Trump Speech to Look Like Liz Cheney Threat.
And thus, on the weekend before the election, we’ve entered some sort of bizarre hell-world in which Vox’s Zack Beauchamp is a voice of sanity:
As Jim Treacher tweets, “You know you f**ked up when Gaza Bridge Dude tells you to pump the brakes.”
At his Substack, Treacher adds: “Remember when it was cool to fantasize about a Republican politician actively fighting in a war?”
I don’t remember anybody crying about The Onion wanting to “assassinate” Bush.That was then, this is now. If it weren’t for double standards, Democrats would have none at all.
The DNC-MSM going all-in to defend the Cheneys (after begging Dubya to endorse Kamala) 20 years after the above Onion page is just astonishing to watch.
UPDATE: Hmmm:
Well, that would make the gang at the Bulwark very happy.
MILBLOGGER LAUGHING WOLF REMINDS YOU TO Brace, Brace, Brace.
I highly recommend going back and re-reading Larry Correia’s excellent takes on the 2020 elections, here and here. There are some other good ones out on that election, and 2022, but those do a very good job of establishing the patterns. Patterns we are already starting to see in Colorado (passwords, multiple other issues, trying to keep Trump off the ballot), Minnesota (multiple votes same voter ID number, etc.), Michigan (Chinese student voting), Pennsylvania (closing lines, voter intimidation, etc.), and, well, there are more.
In some cases, you will hear ‘oh, it’s just the one’ and other excuses, but keep in mind: each of these is a canary in the coal mine. Where there is one, there are usually more. Unlike 2020, the RNC and others are quick to file complaints, lawsuits, and such — but they still don’t stop many of the efforts (cough, Pennsylvania, cough). Oh, and if you watch some of the video from Pennsylvania starting with the two ‘Emergency Services’ people stopping the line. Pay particular attention to the body language of the dark-haired guy: that’s someone hoping for a fight, a chance to use force. Nor is he alone if you look at the other videos and watch the body language. Remember, mouths lie but body language rarely does. Also keep in mind that at least one person associated with a campaign has apparently been arrested in PA for telling people not to leave the line when (illegally) ordered to do so. While it will be an interesting case to follow later, it’s already succeeded in intimidation and more for now. Also remember, process is punishment.
While we are at it, don’t forget this going on in Arizona and elsewhere. Now, for non-domestic shenanigans, please pay attention to this story as this and worse are quite likely to be happening well outside the Pacific NW.
Much more to chew on at the link.
WHY JEWS MUST VOTE FOR TRUMP: The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz leaves no doubt about how he thinks his fellow Jewish American voters should vote in the presidential contest.
VANCE, LIKE TRUMP, IS COMFORTABLE IN HIS OWN SKIN: The PR Fallout of JD Vance Joining the Joe Rogan Experience: Let the Bromance Begin!
JEFFREY CARTER ON Our Feeble Jobs Report.
NEW CHIEF AT OPEN THE BOOKS: John Hart is the new Chief Executive Officer at Open the Books, succeeding founder Adam Andrzejewski, who passed away unexpectedly in August. If you missed it, check out my tribute to Adam here.
My Epoch Times profile of John this morning points to a veteran “Transparency Revolutionary” who helped give birth to the biggest database of government spending at all levels ever assembled. And now he has a vision and opportunity for marrying transparency and technology in new ways to limit government.
PROMOTED FROM O-DARK-30
