Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

The start of the third quarter saw a deterioration in business conditions at US manufacturers as new orders declined for the first time in three months, according to S&P Global.

This makes sense as we have seen ‘hard’ US macro data serially disappoint for three months.

• S&P Global US Manufacturing PMI falls to 49.6 in July, dropping into contraction for the first time since Dec 2023.
• ISM Manufacturing PMI plunged to 46.8 (48.8 exp) – weakest since Nov 2023 (near post-COVID lockdown lows)

The FBI is going to resume its coordination with social-media companies on content moderation ahead of the 2024 election, after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to free-speech advocates who argue the federal government’s close cooperation with Big Tech firms violates the First Amendment.

According to a Department of Justice memo drafted earlier this month, the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”

By “Foreign Malign Influence,” what they mean, of course, is “the possibility of a Trump victory.”

The memo is featured in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the effectiveness of the department’s information-sharing system for monitoring foreign threats to U.S. elections. National Review has reached out to the FBI for comment on the memo.

Horowitz recommended the DOJ increase its transparency around the policies it put in place to ensure information sharing does not trample on the First Amendment, and to ensure the coordination strategy evolves to keep up with ever-changing foreign threats. The report’s appendix says both of the recommendations have been taken up by the DOJ, and requests documentation of the FBI’s outreach to social-media companies over the coming months.

The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and local offices will be tasked with building relationships with social-media companies in areas under the purview of various FBI field offices. As part of this outreach strategy, FBI officials are being instructed to make companies aware of the new standard operating procedure for monitoring suspected foreign influence operations online.

I’m so old that I remember when the primary duty of the FBi was to solve crimes, not to aid the Democratic Party…

Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.

Rowe succeeded former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after bipartisan calls following her widely panned testimony before the House Oversight Committee. But both Rowe and Cheatle were directly involved in decisions denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.

It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.

🚨🚨🚨 EXCLUSIVE: A Secret Service counter sniper sent an email Monday night to the entire Uniformed Division (not agents) saying he will not stop speaking out until "5 high-level supervisors (1 down) are either fired or removed from their current positions." The counter sniper… pic.twitter.com/0dg99EESQk

— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) July 30, 2024

The Democratic Party ruling class’s bloodless coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, who also happens to be the nominal sitting president of the United States, is one of the most astonishing political developments of my lifetime. Joe Biden, though clearly physically and mentally impaired, has sought the presidency for quite literally longer than I have been alive. Biden had been defiant ever since the June 27 presidential debate debacle that he was not going anywhere, despite overwhelming pressure from party elites and sycophantic media lapdogs demanding he do precisely that. He has a Lady Macbeth-like wife who craves power, and he has a felonious son in desperate need of a presidential pardon.

Yet the coup succeeded. Biden became the first incumbent president to not seek reelection after his first term since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Biden made the much-anticipated announcement—not with a solemn Oval Office address—three days later, and he didn’t even explain his decision. Rather, he issued a bedridden tweet from a personal, not even official, account. It’s the equivalent of divorcing your wife over text message. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the announcement came smack in the middle of a five-day period in which Biden was not publicly seen and during which he apparently experienced an unspecified medical emergency. Suspicious much?

The Democrats’ decision to coup their own president is a curious one, on the political merits.

Hold aside the galling hypocrisy of the purported party of “democracy” trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under an outlandish constitutional theory while simultaneously attempting to bankrupt, prosecute and incarcerate him on equally spurious grounds. Hold aside the self-proclaimed party of “democracy,” feigning ignorance over how its overheated rhetoric laid the seeds for their political opponent’s recent near-assassination and its continuing to depict that opponent as an existential threat to the American constitutional order. And hold aside that purportedly “democratic” party deposing its own presumptive elected nominee—a stark reversal from its presidential primary, when party poobahs worked hard to shut out all viable competition. Somewhere in Minnesota, Dean Phillips would like a word.

Hold all that aside. Because even on its own terms, the coup of Biden for cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris is going to spectacularly backfire on the Democrats.

Already, Democrats and the corporate media have been working hard to “define” Harris for the American people. At times, this has included some rather dubious retconning, such as magically pretending she wasn’t the Biden administration’s appointed “border czar.” (She was.) But the even bigger problem for Democrats is that Harris is not an unknown commodity. On the contrary, she is a very well-known commodity—one who just happens to be about as popular with the American public as venereal disease.

Harris’ current average approval rating is under 38%, and an NBC News poll last June found her to be the single least popular vice president in American history—only 32% of Americans had a positive view of her, putting her 17 points underwater. Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was an absolute dud, self-imploding well before the first primary votes were cast. And as recently as a month or two ago, Democratic elites were openly discussing whether she could still be dropped as Biden’s 2024 running mate. Funny how quickly one can go from the weakest link to the great savior of “Our Democracy.”

Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history. Do Democrats really think Harris’ support for the Green New Deal and a national fracking ban will play well in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania or in the auto factories of Detroit? Will white working- and middle-class voters concerned about skyrocketing crime look favorably upon Harris’ enthusiastic support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, which racked up $2 billion worth of property damage?

Tucson-based World View, cofounded by now-U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly in 2012, received venture capital from Tencent — among the largest tech companies in China — both in 2013 and 2016. Tencent, like most Chinese tech giants, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party….

Spy balloons partially funded by ChiComm ties? Like, how is this considered a totally normal business for a Senator to be in?

"She's always been black…"

Classic black family photo: pic.twitter.com/O5tmQhhBng

— Raheem. (@RaheemKassam) July 31, 2024

(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Early in the morning, the FBI raided the home of Linda Sun, a former official for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration. Sun served as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff for a year. Before that, she was the deputy superintendent for intergovernmental affairs and chief diversity officer under disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The federal officers searched the $3.5 million home, which resides in the exclusive neighborhood of North Shore.

That’s on top of a raid aimed at Winnie Greco, a top aide to New York Mayor Eric Adams.

While the left is trying it’s hardest to recast Kamala Harris as a moderate Democrat – quietly scrubbing her public record over the past 5 years – her actual positions have always been radical.

For starters, she’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, ban fracking and offshore drilling, defund the police, provide US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and ban private health insurance.

Meanwhile, during 2020 Democratic primary debate Harris said that if elected president, she would “ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons.”

She also said she would reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and DACA protection for illegal immigrants, and end other Trump-era immigration policies.

And in multiple speeches and interviews, Harris insisted America needed racial ‘equity’ as well as ‘equality.’ In other words, she endorses ‘equality of outcomes’ over ‘equality of opportunity.’

As The Federalist pointed out on Tuesday:

• She Supported Bailing Out 2020 Rioters
  Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike benefitted in June 2020 when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested for their months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis. The vice president later lied about her involvement in the money-raising scheme.

• She Put Other Countries’ Borders Before Her Own
  Harris traveled thousands of miles away from the U.S. border invasion she was tasked with handling to deliver “peace and security” to the borders of Ukraine, which “is a country.”

• She Proudly Enabled the Jussie Smollett Race Hoax
  Harris called the staged hate crime an “attempted modern-day lynching.” She did not apologize even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.

• She Sponsored Legislation That Would Codify Abortion Through All Nine Months
  As a senator, Harris was a proud co-sponsor of the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which sought to codify abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

• She’s Openly Anti-Catholic
  As a senator in 2018, Harris smeared Brian Buescher, a nominee for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, for his affiliation with the famous Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus and its historically pro-life views.

In 2019, Kamala Harris was rated the ‘most liberal’ Senator in a now-scrubbed rating from GovTrack. She’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, banning fracking and offshore drilling, defunding the police, providing US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and banning private health insurance.

According to the NY Times, “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”

“The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”

To that end, McCormick’s campaign has produced one of the first TV ads to attack Harris on her longstanding positions.

Yet, according to the Times, nevermind all that- Harris is now a reformed moderate – and has suddenly reversed course on virtually all of her most radical views.

On Friday, the Harris campaign announced that she no longer wants to ban fracking – a ‘significant shift’ from where she stood four years ago. She’s also reversed course on funding for border enforcement, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and has walked back liberal fever dreams of a mandatory gun buyback.

She is no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and on Friday her campaign said she would maintain Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. -NYT

Packing the Court? Nah…

On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices, the Trump campaign resurfaced statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 saying she was “open to this conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. Ms. Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr. Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.

According to Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank, Harris has ‘evolved’ into a Biden style centrist (if centrism is defined as letting 20+ million illegals into the country and cooking Americans with inflation).

“There’s a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” said Bennett. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat — she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”

Sure Matt.

The Times also hints that Harris is essentially an idiot who didn’t really understand her own positions while running for president in 2020.

…during that race, Ms. Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign rollout in Oakland, Calif., she appeared tentative while discussing health care policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer health care program.

She would go on to propose an array of policies popular with progressives. She sought to increase pay for public-school teachers by an average of $13,500 through a bump in the estate tax.

She also called for an assault weapons ban and said she would sign an executive order mandating background checks for customers of any dealer who sold more than five guns in a year.

Minnesota governor Tim Walz is on the short list to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. This is almost laughable when you look at Walz’s record running the state government, which somehow manages to combine the honesty of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the competence of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and the sharp-eyed ethical-watchdog instincts of soon-to-be-former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. A whole lot of shady and unethical people in Minnesota see the state government as a giant pile of money just waiting to be taken, with a sleepy guard in the form of the governor.

Gentle parenting people confused by your white-people meetings. https://t.co/gdtgurLV5O pic.twitter.com/lw3UZuetyq

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) July 30, 2024

Like the electoral blowout feared by national Democrats with Biden at the top of the ticket, Phelan’s abysmal record of the Texas House under his mismanagement resulted in a political disaster; more incumbent Republicans lost their primary re-election campaigns than any time in modern history.

Phelan himself is damaged goods, politically. He outspent his primary opponent by a 5-to-1 margin yet garnered a “win” of less than 700 votes in a race that saw a couple of thousand Democrats flip primaries, clearly to “help” him.

Everyone in the House knows that their defeated colleagues earned challengers because Phelan made them vulnerable… and then left them to go down in defeat.

But he is, for now, still the speaker… in name, anyway.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was publicly done with Phelan more than a year ago after the speaker and his cronies sent a deeply flawed, legally problematic, and factually vacuous “impeachment” of Attorney General Ken Paxton to be sorted out by the Senate.