Cynically running out the clock has been the overarching principle of the entire abbreviated 105-day presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris — ever since President Joe Biden, at the 11th-hour, dropped out in July. Harris seems unwilling or unable to answer any impromptu question that she has not been previously prepped for. Her answers at the debate were memorized and canned. They never addressed the questions asked. Her single, 11-minute post-debate Philadelphia interview was a shipwreck of dodging and dissimulating — even though the host was sympathetically left-wing. Even socialist Bernie Sanders pointed out that for Harris to get elected, she must temporarily disown her lifelong leftist credentials. As vice president, she must further deny co-ownership of the unpopular record of the Biden-Harris administration. Left unstated is that whether she wins the presidency — or loses it and continues as vice president for another three months — nonetheless she will inevitably revert back to her hard-core, lifelong leftist beliefs. In addition, Harris has reconstructed her privileged upbringing as a child of two PhDs, living in a posh Montreal neighborhood into a struggling, middle-class Oakland childhood. How can she stage such a complete makeover — and contemptuously count on the voting public to be so easily deceived? She avoids all news conferences, one-on-one nationally broadcast interviews, and town halls. And like Biden, she will debate only on leftist venues with impartial pro-Harris moderators. When asked to provide the details of her past responsibility for the open border, inflationary economy, spiraling crime, attacks on fossil fuels, and collapsing foreign policy, Harris smiles, makes hand gestures, and dodges. She changes the subject to her empathetic personality, her “joy” campaign, and her iconic profile as a supposedly dynamic black woman. When pressed, Harris outsources the task of squaring her hypocrisies and subterfuges to the stonewalling campaign, Democratic surrogates — and the media. Harris is also certainly not running on her demonstrable experience, vision, or intelligence as much as she is not Trump (or, for that matter, her former partner, Biden). To make that distinction stark, Harris must demonize and bait Trump nonstop and make the country fear him. So, she paints Trump as a racist and violent insurrectionist, not a former president whose four-year term saw a superior foreign policy, economy, border, and security than during the Biden-Harris term. Instead, Harris has repeatedly claimed Trump is a dictator and a threat to democracy — as if he had politically weaponized the FBI, CIA, DOJ, or IRS as had former President Barack Obama and Biden. Trump as Hitler has become a staple Democrat smear for the past decade. That vicious caricature is so entrenched that major Democratic figures assume it’s OK to joke about, or seriously call for, Trump’s demise. So, Harris’s current prominent advisor David Plouffe years ago warned the nation that “it is not enough to simply beat Trump. He must be destroyed thoroughly. His kind must not rise again.” Just last year, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., claimed that Trump “is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be, he has to be eliminated.” Even after an assassin sought to kill Trump last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared, “Extreme MAGA Republicans are the party of a national abortion ban and Trump’s Project 2025. We must stop them.” Harris’s dehumanizing of Trump, outsourcing the campaign to the media, avoiding all public dialogue, and temporarily reinventing one’s politics and biography have taken a toll on the country. Harris was coronated the Democratic candidate without ever entering a primary or winning a single delegate by vote. Some 14 million Democrat primary voters were reduced to irrelevancy. Like the 2020 Biden campaign, Harris has nationalized a new kind of cynical campaign in which leftist candidates seek for a few months to deceive the public into thinking they are centrist and moderate — until elected. Avoiding all cross-examination and outsourcing the campaign to the obsequious media is now the new norm. Most news stories deemed unhelpful to Harris — the left-wing, pro-Harris politics of the recent would-be Trump assassin, the distortion that dozens of bomb threats were called in against Springfield schools by Trump supporters when most, if not all, were perpetrated by foreign actors, or prominent Democrats before and after the recent assassination attempt blaming Trump for being the target of an assassin — are suppressed by the media. The recent two foiled assassination attempts on Trump logically follow a near-decade pattern of trying to destroy rather than outvote him. The Russian collusion hoax, the laptop disinformation con, the two impeachments, the effort to remove Trump from some 16 state ballots, and the attempt to jail and bankrupt Trump through five criminal and civil “lawfare” indictments and suits also led to the current hateful climate of Trump assassination attempts. Harris thinks her delays, deceptions, and vilifications for the next 47 days will ensure her victory. But if so, it will be because she, her stealth campaign, and her self-proclaimed guardians of democracy have been willing to systematically destroy it. (C) 2024 Tribune Content Agency LLC We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Can Harris’s Cynical, Run-Out-the Clock Campaign Succeed? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Podcaster Tim Pool filed a defamation lawsuit against Vice President Kamala Harris‘ presidential campaign Thursday. Pool says he has faced an increase in death threats and that suspicious people have been monitoring his place of business, two developments he finds alarming after two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump. “It’s putting a target on my back for things I don’t believe and things I actually argue against,” Pool told The Daily Signal in an interview Friday. Pool’s lawsuit focuses on one specific post on the social media platform X from Harris’ campaign, on Aug. 31. “Trump operatives say their Project 2025 plan is to give Trump total, unchecked legal power so they can jail and execute those who don’t support Trump if he wins (They have since scrubbed this video from YouTube),” the campaign posted. Trump operatives say their Project 2025 plan is to give Trump total, unchecked legal power so they can jail and execute those who don’t support Trump if he wins(They have since scrubbed this video from YouTube) pic.twitter.com/z6VVtthKr4— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) August 31, 2024 The Harris campaign included a video clip from May 31, in which Pool calls for putting Democrats in jail if they get convicted of crimes. Elsewhere in the video, Pool insists that any jailed Democrats should face charges through the legal process, with their civil rights honored. Pool’s Response to the Post Pool claims the X post is egregiously false on multiple levels. First, he calls it “absolutely incorrect” to say he is a “Trump operative.” Second, he has no affiliation with Project 2025 or the organization behind it, The Heritage Foundation. Third, “It stated that I wanted Trump to have extra-judicial authority to jail and execute the people who refuse to support him, which is, I believe, the most shockingly extreme thing you could accuse someone of advocating for or believing.” “I didn’t specifically say ‘political opponents,’ it said ‘those who don’t support him,’ as if to imply your run-of-the-mill voter who says, ‘I don’t support Trump,’ may face extrajudicial execution by some kind of psychotic dictatorial regime,” the podcaster explained. “It’s an absurdity, it’s insane.” He framed the claim, which he said is false, this way: “One of the top presidential campaigns claims that a top global podcast, prominent political show is calling for run-of-the-mill voters who don’t support Trump to be executed should he win.” Pool has long opposed the death penalty, and he went on to condemn the death penalty in that May 31 video. As for the claim that he “scrubbed” the video from YouTube, Pool says he only removed the video because YouTube flagged it, but that the entire video remains up on Rumble and other platforms. Increase in Threats Pool said the Harris campaign’s post led to an increase in threats against him and his company. “Within a few days of this post going up, a strange man started lurking around one of my properties, our old studio location where we no longer operate out of,” he recalled. Employees told him that “a strange individual wearing a dress was trespassing on the property and filming the building.” “This individual apparently got into a fight, injuring one of our employees,” he added. “I have absolutely seen an uptick in” social media messages, “some insinuating to the effect of wanting me to die or intending to have me die.” Pool said he receives “death threats… on a regular basis.” He said he and his company were swatted 13 times in 2022, that malignant actors deceived police into sending an emergency response team to his offices. Police once searched his office while he was live on air. Pool said he received bomb threats with “bomb machines” and credible threats, he said. “But after this tweet goes out, I certainly noticed a dramatic increase in messages,” he said. Threats used to come “once or twice a month,” but Pool said now the number is “in the hundreds.” Defamation Hurdles James R. Lawrence III, a partner at Envisage Law and former chief counsel at the Food and Drug Administration at the end of the Trump administration, is representing Pool in the defamation lawsuit. In order for Pool’s lawsuit to succeed under the Supreme Court’s precedents starting with New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), Pool has to prove that the Harris campaign spread a falsehood against him with “actual malice,” or a “reckless disregard for the truth.” Lawrence admitted that the standard represents a high bar, but he cited the case of D.A. King v. Southern Poverty Law Center—a defamation case that cleared a key legal hurdle last year—as evidence of a similar case. King pleaded that the Southern Poverty Law Center defamed his organization, the Dustin Inman Society, by calling it an “anti-immigrant hate group,” years after the SPLC had explicitly stated that it was not a “hate group.” This key detail bolstered King’s case and made it easier for him to claim that the SPLC knew it was false to call his organization a “hate group.” Similarly, Pool and Lawrence argued that the Harris campaign must have done research on Pool’s show, and that a modicum of research would have revealed Pool’s opposition to the death penalty and his support for civil liberties. “They state that it had since been scrubbed by YouTube, which would indicate they did some looking into what the show actually was,” Pool said. As for the clip the campaign posted, it “had been out in the internet or on the internet being discussed for two months,” Lawrence noted. Outlets such as Mediaite had covered the interview, and that coverage “does not attribute these atrocious views to Tim in particular… but focuses on what others on the broadcast were saying.” None of the reports from the time claim that Pool “advocated for… Donald Trump to be made dictator, for the Constitution to be suspended, and for President Trump in a second Trump administration to imprison and then execute his political enemies,” the lawyer noted. “You don’t see any of that in the reporting.” Lawrence also noted that the tweet has been viewed by 12 million people on X, and that it has made it more difficult for Pool to reach out to liberals and moderates with whom he would like to engage ahead of the 2024 presidential election. The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. Complaint – Pool v. Harris Filed – colorizedDownload The post ‘PUTTING A TARGET ON MY BACK’: Tim Pool Explains Why He’s Suing the Kamala Harris Campaign for Defamation appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Are Conservative and Liberal Brains Different? Maybe Just a Little

Roughly one in 10 American workers are self-employed, and roughly one in 3 perform some type of independent work, whether that is full-time or part-time employment or a side hustle alongside a traditional job. These figures may be even higher in Georgia. A 2022 self-employment report highlighted Atlanta and Gainesville, Georgia, as having some of the highest percentages of self-employed workers of any large and small cities, respectively. Moreover, the Associated Builders and Contractors ranked Georgia the No. 1 state for construction in 2023, and construction has one of the highest — and rising — percentages of independent contractors. America already has too few people working. If the employment rate were the same as it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, 2.9 million more people would be working today. Workers of all types want to know which policymakers offer a better platform for workers’ prosperity. While both parties and virtually all politicians assert pro-worker stances, their approaches to “helping” workers look nothing alike. In particular, progressives say they want to help all workers, but in reality, their policies pick winners and losers instead. Take the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to diminish self-employment and force virtually all workers into traditional 9-to-5 jobs, which include reporting to a boss and being subject to thousands of pages of labor and employment laws. In particular, a new Biden-Harris regulation would make it illegal for companies to do business with many independent contractors, freelancers, and gig workers. This regulation mirrors a law in Harris’ home state of California, AB 5, which has proven deeply unpopular. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) also supports moving more people out of independent work and into big corporations. He signed into law severe punitive penalties for employers who — whether intentionally or by mistake — misclassify employees. The law also imposes excessive restrictions, including a 14-factor test, on independent contractors in the construction industry. The full consequences of these laws are still unfolding, but they are likely to be severe. In 2023, about 64 million Americans engaged in independent work, whether full-time, part-time, as gig workers, or through side hustles. These independent workers aren’t limited to just accountants or Uber drivers — they include IT consultants, makeup artists, babysitters, musicians, interpreters, fitness instructors, copy editors, and truck drivers, to name a few. Independent workers say it provides better work-life balance, the same or higher income, and flexibility that leads to less stress and better health. In fact, nearly half of independent workers say that no amount of money would cause them to go back to traditional employment. Many people — especially parents, caregivers, and individuals with health conditions — want or need flexible jobs, and this rule will take them away. Half of the people who perform independent work say that they are unable to work for a traditional employer because of their personal circumstances. AB 5 in California has wreaked havoc on more than 600 professions, with hundreds of workers sharing how they’ve been harmed. The law is so unpopular that lawmakers have granted more than 100 exemptions and voters passed a referendum exempting ridesharing companies from the statute. The law continues to restrict employment and incomes in the state. Researchers found that AB 5 slashed self-employment by 10.5% in California. Instead of achieving lawmakers' intended goal of pushing more workers into formal jobs, the law led to a 4.4% decline in total employment. Beyond hurting workers who want and need flexibility, restrictions on independent contractors also harm small businesses. In a 2021 poll, 62% of small- and medium-sized businesses said their company’s success depended on independent contractors or that running a profitable business would be much harder without them. Small businesses rely on independent contractors to help them grow and compete with larger companies. On average, small businesses with four or fewer employees use 6.7 contractors. America already has too few people working. If the employment rate were the same as it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, 2.9 million more people would be working today. The last thing Americans need is another regulation that makes it harder to make a living and to afford the rising cost of living. Although the Biden-Harris regulation has only been in effect since March, and it’s too early to fully study its effects, the employment-to-population ratio dropped by 0.3 percentage points between March and July. This decline represents a loss of 700,000 workers. If the next administration continues to push similar policies, Georgians will likely be among the Americans who suffer the most.

Archaeologists digging at the remains of an ancient Gaulish village in the French town of Dieppe came across a note left by an archaeologist who'd worked at the same site in 1825. The post 200-Year-Old Message In A Bottle From An Archaeologist Found At The Remains Of An Historic Village In Northern France appeared first on All That's Interesting.

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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by STR / NurPhoto, Getty Images Cards Against Humanity sued SpaceX for allegedly trespassing on and damaging its property in Texas. The company behind the card game is asking for $15 million in damages, according to its complaint against SpaceX, filed in Texas state court on Thursday, but has also said it will “accept Twitter.com in compensation.” SpaceX has been using the “pristine vacant property” in Cameron County, Texas, without permission for around six months, the suit claims. Cards Against Humanity bought the plot in 2017 as part of a stunt to “make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for [former President Donald] Trump to build his wall.” SpaceX has since acquired “many of the vacant lots” on the road surrounding Cards Against Humanity’s property,... Continue reading…