Vance on X: “I thought the reporters traveling with Kamala might be a little lonely given that she never answers questions from them, so I figured I’d come say hello and check out my new plane while I was at it.”

Where Vance was the ultimate volunteer, choosing a service he knew would result in deployment to Iraq, Walz approached his enlistment to get benefits and improve his chances for professional advancement. When Vance was ordered to Iraq, he went. When Walz, the senior noncommissioned officer in his battalion, was ordered to Iraq, he quit and left his men high and dry.

This is not a slip of the tongue. Smith serves with Vance in the Senate. She has to be familiar with his life story. This was an attempt to set a narrative with CNN's native demographic of low-functioning midwits. Note how reluctant Acosta is to upset the apple cart.

Taken together, these two things indicate that Donald Trump and JD Vance are facing opponents who will casually tell the most extravagant lies and stoop to the worst kind of slanderous comments because they know their audience doesn't care and they have no fear of being challenged by the media.

There is no evidence that Donald Trump faked a disability to dodge the draft. That allegation has floated around and was investigated in detail by the New York Times. As Hasan was one of the loud voices pushing the debunked Russia Hoax, I wouldn't expect him to be particularly persuaded by the truth. But, arguendo, let's concede that a friendly doctor got Trump out of the draft after his student deferments ran out in 1972. By 1972, American involvement in the Vietnam War was running down. Trump's birthday is June 14, giving him a lottery number of 113. The highest lottery number called up in Trump's year of eligibility was 95. //

epaddon
8 hours ago
Donald Trump took a bullet. Tim Walz tried to avoid one. End of discussion.

The Left only destroys epaddon
8 hours ago
Donald Trump was hit by more bullets than Tim Walz was. 😁

streiff The Left only destroys
8 hours ago
Trump was missed by more bullets than Walz

Min Headroom llme epaddon
7 hours ago
And let’s not forget that after being shot and shot at Trump’s gotten right back up and gone right back out there, while knowing for a fact that the agency that is supposed to have his back is at best case incompetent for the job.

Walz didn’t even get to the point where he might get shot at before he cut and ran.

As it turned out, on Wednesday, both JD Vance and Kamala Harris were arriving at the airport in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Once again, Harris needed help to buff out her crowd by having a popular musician at her event, Bon Iver.

But when Vance arrived, he skewered Harris' effort to avoid reporters but good. He walked over to where Air Force Two was and delivered a great shot.

Vance joked, "It's going to be my plane in a few months."

Then he said, "I also thought you guys may get lonely" because Kamala Harris "doesn't answer questions from reporters and hasn't in 17 days." He asked them if the Harris team had given them any explanation for her avoiding the media. He said he thought it would be good if she took questions rather than running a campaign from a basement and with a teleprompter. Then he smiled and thanked them.

His tactic worked. One reporter asked what he wanted to hear from Harris. Vance responded he wanted to hear what she wanted to do in the office and why her positions have all flip-flopped. He said she pretended to be a tough-on-crime prosecutor but then was for defunding the police and opening the border.

Vance finished by saying it was "disgraceful" how she was blowing them off, as Harris was avoiding the media with her motorcade pulling away behind Vance.

A video of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) was unearthed on Monday that appeared to show him threatening civil war if Donald Trump won the election.

Raskin was speaking at a discussion on voter rights hosted by a left-wing professor when he made the controversial comments, which included a pledge to disqualify Trump on January 6th, 2025 based on the Fourteenth Amendment. //

He seems completely convinced that he would be the good guy in a scenario where he and other Democrats overturned an election based on their own political whims. He calls Trump supporters "rampaging mobs" despite them representing the side that won the election in his hypothetical.

DESANTIS: Well, here's what I would just say generally. The election needs to be about the fact that Kamala Harris is an unacceptable choice for president of the United States. Doesn't matter what you thought before. Now, she cannot be president for a variety of reasons. I've articulated some. I know the campaign has done other.

Any other energy spent talking about anything else, I think, is playing on the Democrats' turf. They want the election to be about something that the VP candidate said five years ago or something that happened ten years ago. If we're arguing on that, then the Democrats are in a better spot. This is about Kamala.

She is not equipped to be president. That's why Obama didn't endorse her right out of the gate, because he knows that. Now it looks like she's corralled the nomination, but we can't act like she's somehow an acceptable choice. She's the most left-wing nominee that we have had in this country in at least fifty years. //

Hallen
12 hours ago
DeSantis is 100% right here. We all must stay focused on Harris. She is not acceptable as president. She is that bad. I mean, I hate Obama, but he was at least competent at what he did even if everything he did was awful. Harris will be bad at everything she does and she'll make huge mistakes. She'll be far worse than even Biden was. That must be the message.

Republicans -- ALL Republicans must stay on message about that.
No, don't call her puerile names. No, don't bring up her flip-flopping race claims. No, don't even bring up her using sex to gain power. Let surrogates do that.

For all pundits, politicians, Trump staff, and Trump/Vance themselves, it must be about how incompetent Harris is and what a disaster her Vice Presidency was and how influential she was with the Biden administration. That's evidence of how bad she will be as president.

Rep. August Pfluger
@RepPfluger
·
Follow
Our country was millimeters away from a presidential assassination.

My bill ensures all presidential candidates are protected and requires the Secret Service Director to be confirmed by the Senate.

USSS Directors MUST be capable and apolitical.
12:59 PM · Aug 5, 2024 //

Robbie Mouton
@mcgmouton57
·
Follow
Senators Chuck Grassley(R-IA) and Catherine Cortez Masto(D-Nev.) have introduced the 'Protect Act' that would require Senate confirmation for all future USSS Directors. This would remove it from being a presidential appointment and bring it line with other federal law enforcement… Show more
12:00 PM · Jul 27, 2024

Better that the social media platforms let a thousand flowers bloom, and let folks figure out for themselves what is and isn't credible. This is the age of the internet, after all; we are into the third generation of Americans growing up in the Information Revolution, and while sometimes one must winnow a ton of chaff to find a grain of wheat, better we do the winnowing ourselves than to have faceless scolds sitting in a cubicle in Silicon Valley do it for us.

ConservativeInMinnesota GBenton
6 hours ago
The Biden administration wasted trillions of dollars on puffery like DEI, pronouns and the green new deal. The result was the worst inflation in US history using historic metrics.

You're telling me that the one area the Biden administration didn't want to spend money was Trump's Secret Service protection? Yeah, I can believe that. //

Clare Boothe Lucid
7 hours ago
Consider this: If Trump had not run this time, the SS would have needed to protect some Republican nominee as well as protecting Trump as a former president, so the SS would have needed two security details. They should gave been able to afford to provide both those SS details to Trump. //

TexasVeteran
7 hours ago edited

"We're not going to burn through our budget — all the extra overtime, all the extra travel, all these extra agents and resources — so that Trump can have all of these rallies every week,'"

I don’t see a problem here. Think of all the money they must be saving with both Biden and Harris hiding in the White House basement!😂

Conservative War Machine
@WarMachineRR
·
Follow
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe Jr. says the Butler rally was the FIRST time counter-snipers were deployed to President Trump’s detail.

2:27 PM · Aug 2, 2024 //

Perhaps most alarmingly, Rowe admitted that an officer on the ground did send a message indicating a person with a weapon had been spotted - but that the Secret Service did not receive it:

Josh Hawley @HawleyMO
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🚨🚨 NEW - Whistleblower tells me Secret Service Acting Director Rowe personally directed cuts to the USSS agents who do threat assessments for events. Whistleblower says those agents were NOT present in Butler - and some of them had warned of security problems for months
3:33 PM · Aug 1, 2024 //

According to Hawley's letter, the normal evaluation by the Secret Service Counter Surveillance Division (CSD), the division that performs threat assessment of event sites before the event occurs, was not done. 

The whistleblower claims that if personnel from CSD had been present at the rally, the gunman would have been handcuffed in the parking lot after being spotted with a rangefinder.

The whistleblower also said it was Rowe who was responsible for cuts to the CSD, reducing the manpower by twenty percent, and he didn't disclose that during his congressional testimony. 

The whistleblower explained there were continuing security concerns about how they were dealing with Trump coverage and that people who spoke up about it faced retaliation.  //

You can see from this angle just how exposed Trump (and Copenhaver) were and you can see a person moving on the roof with a direct line to them. This is what the Secret Service coverage (or lack thereof) allowed.

In the video taken at 6:08 p.m. on July 13, the person appears on the roof of the building adjacent to where Trump is speaking and can be seen walking from the 1:00 second mark to about the 2:50 second mark.

Thomas Crooks allegedly then fired three minutes later, at 6:11.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee held a joint hearing Tuesday to examine the totality of the goat-rope that was security for former President Donald Trump at Butler, PA, on July 13, which led to him being wounded by a rifle bullet (see Sen. Kennedy Hilariously Destroys FBI Over Whether Trump Was Shot: 'It Wasn't a Murder Hornet?') and coming within millimeters of death.

The hearing did not shed a lot of light on the events of July 13. Everyone agreed that the Secret Service accepted responsibility but not so much as to do anything about it; //

All in all, the picture painted was one of a Secret Service management structure that deprived the Trump campaign of requested resources for security because they could. The security coordination for the rally was slipshod and lackadaisical, with no apparent attempt to establish a unified command and operations structure for the different law enforcement agencies involved. //

Not everyone saw a petty, vindictive, blundering command structure in the Secret Service as the proximate cause of the killing of one rally participant and the wounding of two others and a presidential candidate.

Lindsey Graham used his opening statement to insist that someone needed to be fired:
[Video]

Fair enough. But Graham devoted his first question to giving the acting Secret Service director Ronald Rowe carte blanche to ask for more money. //

The Secret Service currently has a budget in excess of $3 billion. Delaware's budget is $4.5 billion. //

Let's review the bidding. The Secret Service has stonewalled the Senate and House in providing details on the assassination attempt. The Secret Service communications apparatus blatantly lied to Congress and the nation. Secret Service agents were diverted from Trump's outdoor rally to beef up the protection for Dr. Jill, who was engaged in what can only be called counter-programming in a secure hotel in Pittsburgh. The site security plan ignored a big f-ing building a mere 140 yards from the speaker's dais. Counter-sniper teams were only made available the day before the rally and did not have time to produce a site plan. No one has been fired. The overwhelming odds are no one will be fired because most of these foul-ups were brought on by decisions made at Secret Service headquarters.

The answer is not more money. As we've seen from history, more money begets more arrogance and more incompetence. The answer is a massive haircut that cleans out the headquarters and eliminates any task that is not a core function of the agency specified by federal statute. If the Secret Service doesn't have adequate resources to protect presidential candidates, maybe their role should be reduced to providing a small command-and-control cell with the actual security provided by something like the successor to Blackwater Worldwide.

As Ronald Reagan said, "If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less of something, tax it."

Just Jim
2 hours ago
I'm tired of hearing "black community." I'm tired of hearing, "What are you going to do for the black community?"
This is a separate-but-equal mentality and until it ends, we will always have to pretend we have racial issues. And that's what it is; a pretense. It's a facade erected by people that want power.
There are very few issues facing black people that aren't faced by people of every other race. The few issues that are supposedly different are either some very specific health issues or issues that have been imposed by decades of failed Democrat policies.
Trump is correct. Solve issues for all Americans and you solve issues for the "black community."

Instead of asking Trump to give reasons why Black voters should vote for him, Scott turned into the "LANGUAGE POLICE," and couched the narrative that it is what Trump says, and not what he does, that is why "Black people" do not like him. Trump rightly called her out on the rude and disingenuous line of questioning.

TRUMP: First of all, I don't think I've ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner, a first question. You don't even say, "Hello," "How are you?" Are you with ABC? Because I think they are a fake news network, a terrible network. And I think it's disgraceful that I came here in good spirit. I love the Black population of this country, I've done so much for the Black population of this country. Including employment, including opportunity zones with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, which is one of the greatest programs ever for Black workers and Black entrepreneurs.
...
I think it's a very rude introduction. I don't know exactly why you would do something like that. And let me go a step further, I was invited here, and I was told my opponent—whether it was Biden or Kamala—I was told my opponent was going to be here. It turned out my opponent isn't here. You invited me under false pretense. //

R SCOTT: Mr. President I would love for you to answer the question...

TRUMP: I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln. That's my answer.

R SCOTT: Better than President Johnson who signed the Voting Rights Act?

} TRUMP: That's my answer. //

And leave it to a Democrat apparatchik to invoke Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the most racist presidents in history, second only to Woodrow Wilson. While Johnson claims the Voting Rights Act, it was overwhelming Republican support that allowed it to be passed into law. So, Scott is either not much of a journalist or not very bright, to bypass these factors. //

TRUMP: The inflation is absolutely destroying our middle class, our working class, virtually every class. Inflation is a disaster in our country. Inflation is a country buster, it breaks every country. And we had, in my opinion, the worst inflation we've ever had—they say it's 58 years but I think it's much more than that—it's been devastating. ...

HARRIS F: What's your plan?

TRUMP: You know what we have to do, we have to bring down cost of energy, and that's going to bring down the cost of inflation. This was all started by a bad energy policy by Joe Biden. //

Faulkner asked the question that got an answer that is a reflection of what Trump deems important not only in a VP candidate, but what elicits respect and admiration from him as a person. Faulkner interjected, "Why did you choose him?" Trump gave a full-throated, 10-toes down response.

Trump War Room @TrumpWarRoom
·
PRESIDENT TRUMP on @JDVance: I chose him because he is a very strong believer in WORK and the working man and woman who have been treated very unfairly.

3:46 PM · Jul 31, 2024

The social media account Abbate referred to in his opening testimony predates the Gab posts and comments, so they emphasized something Crooks wrote when he was younger than 15 and ignored what he wrote when he was older.

None of this means that Abbate lied; it just means that he gave calculated, incomplete information to the country via his public testimony. He knew that "anti-Semitic and anti-immigration themes, espouse political violence, and are extreme in nature" would be like catnip to the media and set the basis for a narrative that Donald Trump's rhetoric motivated the shooter to act with the implication that this was karma. This is not a man or a law enforcement agency that we can trust.

A Secret Service counter-sniper warned in an email there would be another assassination attempt, citing the agency’s inability to protect leaders after a shooter wounded former President Donald Trump, two of his supporters, and killed another at a rally.

“We all SHOULD expect another [assassination] attempt to happen before November,” the counter-sniper wrote in the email obtained by RealClearPolitics and posted to X. “This agency NEEDS to change, if not now, WHEN? The NEXT assassination attempt in 30 days?”

The counter-sniper emailed the entire Secret Service Uniformed Division Monday night, saying the operators assigned to Trump’s fatal rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13 did their jobs “with their hands tied” and that Secret Service supervisors “knew better.”

Now Facebook has been forced to admit that they erroneously censored one of the photos taken immediately after Trump was shot by a 20-year-old sniper at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13. The picture, showing a defiant Trump, depicted the former president rising to his feet and yelling, ”Fight! Fight!” as blood streamed down his face. It instantly became one of the most iconic photos of our times. //

A post on Mark Zuckerberg’s social media site by a user with the handle End Wokeness that showed the Republican presidential candidate defiantly pumping his fist in the air while blood streams down his face had initially been flagged as misinformation.

The user was threatened with being deplatformed.

However, on Monday, Dani Lever, a spokesperson for the social network’s parent company, Meta, admitted the tech giant made a “mistake.”

If you look at what the left has done, they have radically taken this out of context and, in fact, aggressively lied about what I’ve said. The left has increasingly become explicitly antichild and antifamily. They’ve encouraged young families not to have children at all because of concerns over climate change.

Gowdy attempted to trap Vance by pointing out that numerous Americans, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina, and Founding Father George Washington never had biological children. By highlighting these people, Gowdy aimed to challenge Vance's views on the importance of family structure, suggesting that childlessness does not diminish one's ability to serve the country effectively or possess strong leadership qualities. This rhetorical move was intended to put Vance on the defensive and question the validity of his stance on the matter.

Here is a shocker: Vance agreed with Gowdy's assessment because the Fox News host completely missed the point of what Vance was saying in 2021 or purposely misinterpreted it.

Vance said:

Vance agreed with Gowdy’s assessment that “direct offspring are not necessary to be fully invested in the future of this country,” but went on to say being a parent “really does transform your perspective.”

“So this is not a criticism, and was never a criticism, of everybody without children. That is a lie of the left. It is a criticism of the increasingly antiparent and antichild attitude of the left,” Vance said. //

"I’m going to keep on calling that out, because I think it’s important for parents to have a voice,” he said. “I’m proud to be on the ticket with President Trump, a real defender of parents and families."

Kamala Harris has failed her way upward farther than any other 59-year-old woman, with the help of a few male politicians she smarmed. She is attractive to many and non-threatening.

At heart, however, Harris is a radical leftist who’s left no detectable trail of actual accomplishments anywhere – except getting elected in predictably Democrat California.

She’s shown no signs of even mediocre management skills; more than 90 percent of her staff has quit since 2021.

Her 2020 primary bid cratered before a single vote was cast. She reportedly does little to no homework for public appearances. It shows. She looks unserious.

Harris’ judgment is seriously suspect for a wannabe leader of the free world. When the prime minister of Israel, America’s main Mideast ally confronting Iran, visited the White House last week, Harris chose instead to speak to a sorority convention in Indiana. //

Harris’ speaking style comes from the Prof. Irwin Corey School of Rhetoric. Her remarks are replete with impressive words assembled in nonsense order, pauses as if she’s crafting deep thoughts, big hand gestures to distract from empty words, and a laugh that resembles something else.

She also often relies on condescension. (That means talking down to people like this.) //

Trump has called Harris “a lunatic,” which she isn’t. He needs to leave the cheesy attack stuff to JD Vance and outline his own recharged vision for the country’s future, which conveniently would enhance his presidential stature to swing voters.

And be careful in his public remarks. There is a double standard in U.S. politics that is not fair but very real. While women have long encountered a glass ceiling in politics, they also need to appear respected in confrontations with men, even if it's undeserved.

Bullying is counter-productive, and condescension can be lethal. //

Even after four years of covering for a failing man who kept calling her the president, what Harris has going for her is a fresh face, her age (59), and not being Donald Trump.

Harris even handed the worrisome age issue back to Republicans. Trump would be 82 at his term’s end, older than Biden now.

Trump revulsion remains strong among millions. It was key to Biden’s win four years ago. With a flailing Biden atop the 2024 ticket, Democrats likely gave up hope of finally terminating Trump’s presence inside their heads. Many would have thrown away their vote on a third party or stayed home on Election Day, which would cripple down-ticket Democrats.

Not anymore. No one should disregard or underestimate the power of that energizing factor. It could fade. Or endure. //

What ought to concern GOP strategists is that right now, even after the messy coup and before the anticipated big bounce, Harris is surprisingly close to Trump, perhaps ahead.