A recently surfaced recording of a Zoom call between the Biden/Harris team from 2020 reveals disconcerting evidence of the team's intentional targeting and manipulation of voters and relentless bullying of media outlets to control information. //

“One of the smartest things that the party did itself was over the last couple of years, they actually invested in a team that Tim runs… to detect and track misinformation and misinformation narratives in various corners of the internet and then flag them to platforms as a violation of their policy.” //

Matt Orfalea
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RINKEVICH: "We targeted folks based on online behavioral cues, building out personas, based on the type of content they were consuming, what they were searching, the kinds of websites they were visiting so that we could target folks in real-time as they were exposed to that… Show more

4:11 PM · Aug 7, 2024 //

Matt Orfalea
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But the Biden team didn't just get the media to forward their deception, they changed real votes. According to Rinkevich, "concern around [Biden's] mental acuity in particular went down by 8 points over the course of our campaign," resulting in "about 200K" votes for Biden. /16

4:11 PM · Aug 7, 2024

The landmark antitrust ruling against Google on Monday is shaking up one of the longest-standing partnerships in tech. //

During a weekslong trial, Apple executives showed up to explain and defend the partnership. Under a deal that first took shape in 2002, Google paid a cut of search advertising revenue to Apple to direct its users to Google Search as default, with payments reaching $20 billion for 2022, according to the court’s findings. In exchange, Google got access to Apple’s valuable user base—more than half of all search queries in the US currently flow through Apple devices.

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.

Gun sales have remained at over one million per month since 2019, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reported. But they had leveled out before July 2024.

Historically high, gun sales had slowed month-over-month until the incident involving Trump and Harris' elevation to official Democratic presidential candidate, The Washington Examiner reported. //

The NSSF estimated that over the past five years, about 86,410,889 firearms have been sold. This is a significant increase since Biden took office. There appear to be indications that the attempt on Trump’s life may have contributed to the rise in gun purchases.

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.

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.”

After US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google has a monopoly in two markets—general search services and general text advertising—everybody is wondering how Google might be forced to change its search business.

Specifically, the judge ruled that Google's exclusive deals with browser and device developers secured Google's monopoly. These so-called default agreements funneled the majority of online searches to Google search engine result pages (SERPs), where results could be found among text ads that have long generated the bulk of Google's revenue.

At trial, Mehta's ruling noted, it was estimated that if Google lost its most important default deal with Apple, Google "would lose around 65 percent of its revenue, even assuming that it could retain some users without the Safari default." //

But the remedies phase of litigation may have to wait until after Google's appeal, which experts said could take years to litigate before any remedies are ever proposed in court. Whether Google could be successful in appealing the ruling is currently being debated, with anti-monopoly advocates backing Mehta's ruling as "rock solid" and critics suggesting that the ruling's fresh takes on antitrust law are open to attack.

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.

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.

"Are you confident that there will be a peaceful transfer of power in January 2025?" Robert Costa asked Biden.

"If Trump wins, no, I'm not confident at all," Biden said first. He then corrected himself, saying if Trump loses, he's not confident at all. His brain is just mush. While the video released by NBC reflected this, their written story did not reflect what he first said.

What is he actually saying here? If Trump loses then is Biden saying he wouldn't transfer power to Kamala Harris? Does he even understand what he's saying? //

It isn't Trump talking about "mobs." It isn't Trump threatening the Supreme Court. It isn't Trump being anti-democratic and tossing the votes of more than 14 million people to the side in a coup.

It's Democrats who keep suggesting something is going to happen.

As if that weren't twisted enough, now we learn that the TSA whistleblowers who came forward with their concerns about this development are facing retaliatory investigations of their own. //

As Leavitt also notes on Twitter/X, the Quiet Skies program has not even been shown to be effective at its purported aim. //

The whole Quiet Skies program seems like a civil liberties nightmare anyway.

Over four years the OIG examined, the found Quiet Skies confirmed precisely zero passengers as aviation security threats. I can think of far better uses for the hundreds of thousands of dollars DHS puts into this.

The rally was held at a hangar, and people had to ride in shuttle buses (yellow school buses) from the parking area to the hangar. The problem was, there were no signs telling them where to board shuttle buses upon return, and since the hangar was next to a UPS facility, by the time the rally ended there were UPS trucks everywhere, blocking the buses. According to attendee Josiah Lippincott it was utter chaos.

The space agency also confirmed key elements exclusively reported by Ars over the last week, chiefly that NASA has quietly been working for weeks with SpaceX on a potential rescue mission for Wilmore and Williams, that the Crew-9 mission launch has been delayed to September 24 to account for this possibility, and that Starliner is unable to undock autonomously with the current software configuration on the vehicle. //

FabioLx Seniorius Lurkius
6y
10
Subscriptor++
Makes you think that maybe, just maybe, they found issues in the autonomous software back in 2022, but didn't tell anyone because they weren't visible if you couldn't get access to detailed data, and they were banking on not needing it anymore. //

Ajax81611 Smack-Fu Master, in training
3y
50
Subscriptor
NASA's rules for human space flight require less than a 1 in 270 chance of LOM, LOC, or serious injury to the crew. I wish someone had asked, "What is the current risk level assessment? One in what number?" //

Ajax81611 Smack-Fu Master, in training
3y
50
Subscriptor
Why on Earth (pun?) would you on a TEST flight not leave in BOTH options, manual or automated return? I can't fathom that. If the answer is, "this spacecraft isn't capable of that," then I have a bunch of other questions. ///

Quite probably the hardware is different and they would need to test that integration before having confidence in the autonomous mode

Vice President Kamala Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, is being accused of cowardice and lying about his service record while he was serving in the Minnesota National Guard before his time as governor. In a letter to the editor of the West Central Tribune dated November 2, 2018, retired Command Sergeants Major Thomas Behrends and Paul Herr alleged that Walz lied or embellished his service record and shirked his duty as the senior enlisted leader of a Minnesota National Guard unit as it was about to be deployed to Iraq in 2005. //

When Walz and his battalion received warning orders that he, along with the battalion, would need to prepare for activation and mobilization for deployment to Iraq in early 2005, Walz committed the ultimate sin. He quit on his soldiers. //

His official retirement document states, SOLDIER NOT AVAILABLE FOR SIGNATURE. //

CrankyBoomer.substack.com
a day ago
When the going gets tough, the walzers go walzing.

According to his official Report of Separation and Record of Service, he re-enlisted for six years on September 18th, 2001. However, in his response he says that he re-enlisted for four years, conveniently retiring a year before his battalion was deployed to Iraq. Even if he had re-enlisted for four years following Sept.11, his retirement date would have been September 18th, 2005. Why then did he "retire" on May 16th, 2005, before his supposed four-year enlistment was up? And he makes it sound like he "retired" a year before his battalion deployed to Iraq; when in reality he knew when he "retired" that the battalion would be deployed to Iraq.

Tim Walz is an American coward, plain and simple. He betrayed his word, his contract; he betrayed his men. He committed the ultimate act of betrayal, and that is irrefutable. It is beyond offensive to those of us who not only served our country but who had the honor and privilege to serve with our brothers and sisters in combat. //

SeekingRationalThought
8 hours ago
Well said. Having never served, I won't accuse Walz of cowardice. That is for veterans like the writer above, not the likes of me. However, remember this. If Walz, as the senior enlisted in his unit, was willing to abandon his troops, and his responsibilities to them, for personal gain (Congress), what isn't he willing to do for personal gain?