'She promises to be a president for all Americans'

San Diego Zoo is celebrating the birth of a Sumatran tiger cub, a subspecies of which only 600 give or take one-third, remain in the wild. The cub was born August 23rd to first-time mother Jillian. This birth is an important step in San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s ongoing work to conserve Sumatran tigers. Wildlife […] The post San Diego Zoo Celebrates Birth of Sumatran Tiger Cub–Contributing Genetic Diversity to Species with 600 Remaining in Wild appeared first on Good News Network.

Books Alasdair Gray Alasdair Gray’s Speculative Brilliance, From <i>Lanark</i> and <i>Poor Things</i> to His Short Stories Gray’s unbounded imagination and innovative approach to fiction offers a joyful, weird, incredibly immersive experience for fans of the fantastic. By Jonathan Thornton | Published on September 9, 2024 Art by Alasdair Gray Comment 0 Share New Share Art by Alasdair Gray “Of course you changed nothing. The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied. Nobody can persuade owners to share with makers when makers won’t shift for themselves.” —Lanark, 554 Alasdair Gray was a key figure of Scottish literature in the late 20th century, a socialist, and a talented visual artist, some of whose murals can still be seen around Glasgow today. But while his importance to the landscape of Scottish literary fiction has long been acknowledged, he is less frequently acknowledged as one of the great imaginers of the fantastic. Some of this is no doubt due to Gray’s magpie approach to genre. Within the same text he’ll happily mix elements of biography, literary fiction, fantasy, metafiction, and art and design. Gray incorporated his line drawings into his books, meticulously designed the layout of the words and images on the page, and even insisted on having control of the cover art for his books, much of which he created himself. He was fond of formal experiments, pushing what text on a page could do, sometimes to its very limits, with a cheerful playfulness. All this makes Gray’s individual books absorbing works of art in and of themselves, as objects—and no doubt causes massive headaches to publishers trying to make his work available in ebook or audiobook format. They are uniquely compelling and immersive experiences, if occasionally frustrating and opaque.  Yet none of this should discourage the adventurous reader of genre fiction. While it’s possible to quibble about exactly how to categorize his work, in my opinion Gray published at least four key works of fantastic/speculative fiction. His debut novel Lanark (1981) is a towering achievement of the fantastic, in which the fantasy city of Unthank and the real-life Glasgow that Gray grew up in during the post-war period are both mirror images of Hell. Poor Things (1992), recently adapted into a film by Yorgos Lanthimos, is a postmodern reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) that relocates the original to Gray’s beloved Glasgow and uses its metafictional framing to pose feminist questions about narrative and agency. A History Maker (1994) is Gray’s most explicitly science fictional text, exploring life in a future post-scarcity socialist utopia which comes under threat from extremists. And his first short story collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), demonstrates Gray’s skill at crafting Borgesian metafictional puzzles and charming fables in equal measure. Together they demonstrate a body of work that engages with the science fictional and the fantastic in innovative and playful ways.   Lanark Until the council sends us the decimal clocks it’s been promising for so long Unthank is virtually part of the intercalendrical zone. At present the city is kept going by force of habit. Not by rules, not by plans, but by habit. (437) Lanark is the book that made Gray’s literary reputation when it was first released, and in some respects remains his most important achievement. A massive ambitious epic, over four books Lanark tells the story of Duncan Thaw, a working-class artist growing up in Glasgow after World War II, and of Lanark, whom Thaw becomes after his death, a man with no past who finds himself in the magical city of Unthank where there is no sun, the people are subject to bizarre mutating diseases, and life is controlled by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Books one and two chart Thaw’s life, whilst books three and four tell Lanark’s story, but they’re placed out of order (as are the Prologue and Epilogue). The novel actually begins with book three, enveloping the realist depictions of Thaw’s life in Glasgow with Lanark’s life in its fantasy equivalent Unthank. But much of the genius of Lanark comes from its sheer disregard of genre boundaries—the novel incorporates semi-autobiographical realism, surreal fantasy, and a metafictional section where Lanark meets Gray himself, and only acknowledges boundaries between them in order to poke holes in them. Lanark should be mentioned in the same breath as Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975), M. John Harrison’s Viriconium stories (1971-84), and Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen (2001) in terms of great metafictional stories of the urban fantastic. Unthank is a place where time doesn’t follow the normal rules, where you can be infected by a rash of mouths or start growing dragon skin, where the government is in thrall to a malevolent creature, but in its own way Gray’s Glasgow is every bit as wondrous, grotesque and surprising. This sense is encouraged by Gray’s heightened prose, in which the mundane details of Thaw’s life are described with as much vivid hallucinatory intensity as Lanark’s journeys through the underground labyrinths of Unthank. The way that Lanark’s story mirrors and refracts Thaw’s life, with elements of Unthank clearly echoing elements of Glasgow, provides a brilliant commentary on the fantastic’s relationship to reality. Unthank is not an allegory for Glasgow anymore than Lanark is an allegory for Thaw, nor are they metaphors. Rather they are shadowy extensions of their realist counterparts which, through their inhabiting of the imagination, show us deeper truths about the real world.  Of course, Gray’s big trick is that his “real” world is as much a fabrication as the world of Unthank, something acknowledged by the novel’s forays into metafiction. When they meet, Gray and Lanark immediately begin arguing with each other, with Gray resenting his own creation and Lanark interrogating his creator’s ethics and competence—he even accuses Gray of writing bad science fiction, much to Gray’s chagrin! All this happens alongside “an index of diffuse and imbedded Plagiarisms,” in which Gray points out his influences by explaining where he “plagiarized” elements of the text to create his novel, referencing everyone from Carl Jung and Franz Kafka to William Blake and Lewis Carroll. Yet even this is complicated by Gray’s inclusion of imaginary texts alongside real ones, and his continuing of the index beyond the end of the book—in an imaginative flourish, the fates of the surviving characters after the end of the novel can be worked out from Gray’s indices that extend beyond the end of the book. Like both Unthank and Glasgow, Lanark itself is a sprawling, labyrinthine city of a book, mesmerizing and enticing, but one in which the reader is in danger of becoming lost. Poor Things As I said before, to my nostrils the book stinks of Victorianism. It is as sham-gothic as the Scott Monument, Glasgow University, St. Pancras Station and the Houses of Parliament. I hate such structures. Their useless over-ornamentation was paid out of needlessly high profits: profits squeezed from the stunted lives of children, women and men working more than twelve hours a day, six days a week in NEEDLESSLY filthy factories; for by the nineteenth century we had the knowledge to make things cleanly. We did not use it. The huge profits of the owning classes were too sacred to be questioned. To me this book stinks as the interior of a poor woman’s crinoline must have stunk after a cheap railway excursion to the Crystal Palace. (275) After a series of less well-received works, Poor Things revitalized Gray’s career, and remains one of his most popular books. The novel is the author’s reimagining of Frankenstein, transposed to 19th-century Glasgow. But of course, being Gray, it’s not quite that simple. The novel purports to be Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer by Archibald McCandless, M.D., a book published by a vanity printing press and rescued from a skip by one of Gray’s historian friends. Poor Things is a wonderful gothic comedic romp of a story, in which the young doctor McCandless falls in love with Bella Baxter, a woman who has been “created” by benevolent mad scientist and McCandless’ friend Godwin Baxter by taking the body of an anonymous drowned woman and bringing it back to life using the brain of the woman’s unborn fetus. It’s a thoroughly charming story in which Bella resists being influenced by the cynical male figures who surround her and claims her own agency as a woman and a doctor, defying the expectations placed on her gender; eventually, she happily marries McCandless, very much on her own terms. However, this is all immediately contradicted by another note found with the original text, a letter from Bella herself, or Victoria as she is calling herself by then, long after her husband’s death, where she decries the entire story as contemptible nonsense. Both texts are annotated by Gray himself, who purports to believe McCandless’ account, whilst his historian friend sides with Bella’s rebuttal.  The brilliance of Poor Things lies in how Gray pits these two voices against each other. The reader is sucked into McCandless’ story, despite its melodrama and ridiculousness, because it is fun and charming, and Gray is clearly having a great time playing with the gothic form. But crucially, Gray gives Bella her own voice, allowing her to talk back to all the men who have tried to “create” her, either through controlling her education, directly trying to control her life through traditional patriarchal bonds, or by controlling the narrative in which she appears. She reminds the reader of the conventions of Victorian and gothic storytelling that shape McCandless’ narrative, and the political assumptions they reinforce, particularly about gender and class. These contradictory takes on the same history, which are then editorialized upon by Gray and his historian friend, remind us that all narrators are inherently unreliable, that all texts are constructed within a base set of assumptions, that storytelling itself is an inherently political act.  A History Maker “When a lot of folk watch something on a screen they all see the same thing. What a damnable waste of mind! Readers bring books to life by filling the stories with voices, faces, scenery, ideas the author never dreamed of, things from their own minds. Every reader does it differently.” (140) A History Maker is set in a 23rd-century Scottish utopia, in which the technology of household powerplants that can generate any object desired brings capitalism to an end. Wat Dryhope is a hero from the wargames that occupy the men whilst the women of the future run the world. Chaffing against his reputation and the expectations foisted upon him by the society in which he lives, he becomes embroiled in a plan by a group of radicals to use a global war to reinstate capitalism. The main text of the novel tells Wat’s story, but it is prefaced and annotated by Wat’s mother, who received the text from Wat himself before his disappearance, and who is writing these historical notes many years after the failure of the radicals’ plot.  Much has been made of Gray’s influence on other Scottish writers, and in particularly the great Iain M. Banks, who also straddled the worlds of literary and genre fiction. It might be a bit of a stretch to call A History Maker Gray’s attempt at a Culture novel, but it does feature a far-future socialist utopia under threat by malevolent forces, and the shadowy secret society that fights to defend it. It’s just that in this case, the shadowy secret society aren’t Special Circumstances or sentient starships, they’re Scottish grannies sitting round a campfire telling stories.  Gray brings his usual inventiveness and playfulness to exploring the science fictional ideas of utopias and post-scarcity society, but imagining a society built around traditional Scottish forms of storytelling rather than interstellar travel. Even more so than Poor Things, A History Maker reflects on unreliable narrators—both Wat and his mother are telling their version of the story to achieve very specific political aims, and we are reliant on their worldviews to explain to us the reader how this far future society works, with all the baggage that their viewpoints come with. Thus, whether it is us reading the book in the novel’s distant past, or the implied future reader reconstructing their own history from Wat’s story and his mother’s annotations, we are made aware that the tools we are given to grasp the world of the novel contain their own implicit political biases.  Unlikely Stories, Mostly For a moment the wheel of the civilized world was joined to the wheel of heaven. The disaster which fell a moment later was an accident nobody could have foreseen or prevented. I am the only living witness to this fact. I have been higher than anybody in the world. The hand which writes these words has stroked the ice-smooth, slightly-rippled, blue lucid ceiling which held up the moon. (77) Gray wrote many short stories in his life, amounting to seven collections, which these days can all be found in the huge anthology Every Short Story, 1951-2012. His short fiction frequently engages with the fantastic, perhaps more directly than his novels, but still retains his joy at experimenting with form and metafictions. In this way, they bring to mind the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, albeit with Gray’s trademark Glaswegian wit. All his collections are worth reading, but much of his best work in the short form, and his most fantastic, can be found in his debut collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly. As with his novels, Gray took great care with his collections, so many of his stories are accompanied by his striking line art, which adds to the poetic, haiku-like beauty of the text. Into this category falls “The Star,” a charming tale about a boy who finds a fallen star, “A Unique Case,” about a friend who suffers a head injury that reveals he has tiny men working in his brain, and “The Spread of Ian Nicol,” in which an ordinary riveter grows another version of himself out the back of his head. These stories are charmingly whimsical, and beautifully manage to root the bizarre and the inexplicable in the everyday, working-class Glasgow that Gray lived in, using only a few pages and some inventive illustrations.  Other stories are longer and more ambitious. “The Comedy of the White Dog” mixes folklore and sexual farce, whilst “The Great Bear Cult” is a bonkers alternate history about a cult of bear worship that sweeps Britain in the 1930s, told through the format of a script for a faux-documentary. It is the five linked stories that make up the final two-thirds of the book that are the real meat of the collection. These stories are bookended by “The Start of the Axletree” and “The Fall of the Axletree,” an extended riff on the Tower of Babel, in which the ruler of a powerful empire with nowhere left to expand realizes the only way to keep the empire growing is to divert all resources into a grandiose project, a tower that will connect the ground with the sky. The first story chronicles how the emperor comes across the idea and sets his people into building the Axletree, while the last story tells of its inevitable hubristic downfall after it reaches the surface of the sky. The stories in between are kind of implied to be set in the same world. “Five Letters from an Eastern Empire” is perhaps Gray’s most well-realised short story, the tale of a man selected to be a poet in the far Eastern empire—on the other side of the world from the empire building the Axletree—whose illusions about the rightness of the state and the emperor are gradually stripped away as he learns about the horrific costs of empire building. “Logopandocy” is the most radical story in the collection, another riff on the Tower of Babel and an exploration of the decay of language in which language itself collapses over the course of the story, leaving nothing but gesture at the end. And “Prometheus” is a retelling of the myth of the Titan and bringer of fire embedded in the story of a man trying to retell the story of Prometheus as a play. This cycle of stories is as powerful and ambitious as any of Gray’s novels. Gray was a writer whose restless creativity and disregard for genre boundaries led him to frequently engage with fantastical and science fictional ideas. They were tools to be played with, as much as metafiction or autobiography or any of the other techniques and genres Gray would use over the course of his career. His books are tributes to his unbounded imagination and to his love of books as objects of art in their own right. While they can sometimes be messy and daunting, there’s no doubting his ambition. At his best, his books are immersive works of art for the adventurous reader to get lost in, meticulous constructions that reflect the bizarre and confounding worlds contained within. He was one of Glasgow’s key literary voices, and the fantastic was an essential part of how Gray put literary Glasgow on the map. All of these works, and Lanark especially, offer a singular experience that any fan of literary fantasy and the urban fantastic should be eager to embrace.[end-mark] The post Alasdair Gray’s Speculative Brilliance, From <i>Lanark</i> and <i>Poor Things</i> to His Short Stories appeared first on Reactor.

We present you funny dog posts from Sep 01 to Sep 07 that will paws-itively make you through the rest of the week!

Biden Throwing In the Towel on Hostage Deal?

They would have altered the Higgs field and changed reality forever.

Welcome to the strange world of butt sculpture.

Vice President Kamala Harris will meet former President Donald Trump tomorrow night for a debate hosted by ABC News, and she could not have chosen a friendlier forum for their first encounter. A new study by the Media Research Center finds that, of the Big Three evening newscasts, ABC’s World News Tonight has been the most positive towards Harris and the most hostile to Trump. MRC analysts reviewed all 100 campaign stories that aired on ABC’s World News Tonight from the day Harris entered the race (July 21) through September 6, including weekends. Our analysts found 25 clearly positive statements about Harris from reporters, anchors, voters or other non-partisan sources, with zero negative statements — none. That computes to a gravity-defying 100% positive spin score for the Vice President. As for Trump, our analysts found just five clearly positive comments, vs. 66 negative statements, for a dismal 7 percent positive (93% negative) spin score. Our measure of good press/bad press omits partisan comments, as well as “horse race” assessments about the candidates’ poll standings and prospects. So while viewers of ABC’s World News Tonight certainly heard negative comments about Harris during these past six-and-a-half weeks, all of them were from Trump, his campaign team, or other Republicans — never from reporters or nonpartisan sources. At the same time, while our spin score similarly excludes all Democratic soundbites about the Republican nominee, ABC’s reporters and anchors either jumped in to criticize Trump themselves, or broadcast negative comments from non-partisan sources to impart a heavily negative spin to the former President’s coverage. [For more on the methodology, scroll to the end of this article.] During these same weeks, both the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News also delivered highly positive coverage for Harris, and mostly negative coverage for Trump, yet not as extreme as we found with ABC’s World News Tonight. Employing the same methodology, coverage of Harris was 94% positive on CBS, and 71% positive on NBC — historically good press, but not as good as the 100% positive press she received on ABC. As for Trump, his coverage was 77% negative on CBS, and 86% negative on NBC — extremely hostile, but not as dreadful as the whopping 93% negative coverage he received on ABC. Our study also found other ways that ABC’s flagship newscast aided the Democratic nominee:   ■ ABC’s World News Tonight never labeled Harris as “liberal.” Both CBS and NBC correspondents confirmed Harris’s ideology early on in her campaign. Back on July 21, CBS’s Weijia Jiang said Harris “has a liberal voting record that could be balanced with a more moderate VP.” Three days later, NBC’s Liz Kreutz identified Harris as a “self-described progressive prosecutor.” But as of September 4, ABC’s correspondents had yet to call Harris either a “liberal” or a “progressive.” Instead eight stories included brief clips of Republicans (usually former President Trump) calling out Harris’s liberal record. ABC’s reporters and anchors also never criticized Harris’s handling of issues such as the economy or the border. While there were few criticisms of Harris’s policies and ideology on CBS and NBC, they weren’t entirely absent. “Harris is providing few details on her plans, which one nonpartisan group says will add $1.7 trillion to the deficit,” NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez told viewers back on August 17. “And both Republican and Democratic economists have argued against government price controls.”   ■ Unlike ABC, both CBS and NBC occasionally showed voters who oppose Harris. Even during the early, highly-positive honeymoon coverage of Harris back in July, evening news viewers occasionally saw voters who didn’t like the Vice President. Reporting in Georgia back on July 30, NBC’s Peter Alexander interviewed a voter, Ben Wilson, who “blames both Biden and Harris for high prices.” Wilson said he was upset by “everything from gas prices to, you know, eggs, the cost of living, everything.” More recently, Nightly News viewers on September 4 saw a voter in New Hampshire declaring his preference for Trump: “Harris will be four more years of misery.” Yet no such voters were ever included in ABC’s evening news coverage, although they seemed to have no objection to showing pro-Harris voters, such as the fangirl who popped up on the August 18 World News Tonight: “We’re so excited about the Harris/Walz ticket and the hope and the joy.” CBS and NBC both found critics of Harris’s tenure as a prosecutor. “Some progressives called out Harris for being too tough on crime, but conservatives criticized her for being too lenient,” CBS’s Nikole Killion told viewers in an August 22 profile of the new Democratic nominee. No such criticism — from either the right or the left — was shown on ABC’s World News Tonight.   ■ Promoting Trump’s controversies, hiding Harris’s. Back on August 3, both CBS and NBC briefly let their viewers know that Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, had committed adultery during his first marriage. Correspondent Natalie Brand explained on the CBS Weekend News: “Emhoff in a statement obtained by CBS News said that during his first marriage, he went through some tough times on account of his actions and took responsibility in the years since.” Neither network treated Emhoff’s transgression as a big deal, yet ABC didn’t offer up even a second of coverage to this negative story about the Vice President’s husband. Instead, ABC’s Selina Wang that night explained how Harris had “officially lock[ed] up enough votes to become the presumptive Democratic nominee,” and talked about her ongoing search for a running mate. World News Tonight certainly wasn’t shy about giving oxygen to what they presented as Trump controversies. The network talked about Trump’s comment questioning Harris’s race in four different stories, for a combined 3 minutes, 48 seconds of coverage. ABC offered up three different stories (3 minutes, 30 seconds) talking about the kerfuffle following Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate those killed in the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. And the network hit Trump on his comments contrasting the Medal of Honor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on two different nights, tallying up to a total of three minutes, 14 seconds of coverage. “Tonight, Trump still facing criticism....” ABC’s Rachel Scott touted on August 19, three full days after her newscast’s initial coverage of the remark. ABC provided no such scrutiny for Harris’s flubs. Prior to the Vice President’s August 29 interview with CNN, ABC had only allowed six seconds to the idea that she was ducking tough questions. World News Tonight devoted less than a minute of airtime (59 seconds) to the fact that Harris became the Democratic nominee without facing voters in any primary or caucus. Yet on eight different occasions, the network toasted the “historic” nature of Harris as the “first black woman and first Asian American,” as correspondent Selina Wang celebrated back on July 21. “The final night of the Democratic National Convention, and it will be an historic one,” ABC’s David Muir echoed a month later, on August 22. “Vice President Kamala Harris, the first black woman and Asian American set to accept a major party’s nomination for President.” +++++ Tomorrow night’s debate will be moderated by David Muir, the weekday anchor of World News Tonight, and Linsey Davis, who anchors the Sunday edition of the same broadcast. Muir holds the title of “Managing Editor,” which means he can review all of the field reports used on his newscast and assure that they are fair to both sides. Based on the record of the past six and a half weeks, Muir’s newscast could hardly be more one-sided in its approach to the 2024 presidential campaign. It does not augur well for the potential fairness of tomorrow’s debate. METHODOLOGY: To determine the spin of news coverage, our analysts tallied all explicitly evaluative statements about each candidate from either reporters, anchors or non-partisan sources such as experts or voters. Evaluations from partisan sources, as well as neutral statements, were not included. As we did in 2016 and 2020, we separated personal evaluations of each candidate from statements about their prospects in the campaign horse race (i.e., standings in the polls, chances to win, etc.). While such comments can have an effect on voters (creating a bandwagon effect for those seen as winning, or demoralizing the supports of those portrayed as losing), they are not “good press” or “bad press” as understood by media scholars as far back as Michael Robinson’s groundbreaking research on the 1980 presidential campaign.  

Shark Tank star Mark Cuban mounted an absurd defense of Vice President Kamala Harris on CNBC, claiming against all evidence that Harris was a moderate.  This was Cuban’s slavish defense of Harris during the Sept. 5 edition of CNBC’s Squawk Box. When anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin mentioned that previous guests had pegged Harris as a progressive, Cuban objected, calling Harris “pro-business” and claiming that “she’s going center 100%.” The DEI-obsessed billionaire doubled down on this point later in the interview, telling Sorkin, “She's open-minded, she's not an ideologue. She wants to do what is best for business.” The Dallas Mavericks owner proudly provided Sorkin with an example of Harris’s so-called pro-business approach: she would only increase the capital gains tax from 20% to 28%, less than the 33% envisioned by President Joe Biden.  Cuban suggested that 33% was overambitious. “The higher the capital gains tax, the more difficult it is to invest in riskier investments. And the people who have the hardest time getting risk capital are women, people of color [and] young kids that are coming out of colleges, exactly the people you want to take risks on. The higher the cap gains rate, the harder it is to invest in them for obvious reasons,” Cuban commented. It is a day ending in “y” and Cuban, a DEI advocate, has once again implied support for racial and gender discrimination. Taking Cuban at his word, “pro-business” Harris is prepared to aggressively raise taxes, exacerbating the problem he identifies.  Oops. Harris is far from pro-business. To make this claim, Cuban had to ignore, or dismiss, Harris’s major 2024 proposals and the entirety of her 2020 presidential campaign.  First, Harris supports energy policies that will harm consumers and the economy by cutting off access to cheap energy. Her radical record on energy was highly praised by The New York Times in a June 22 article. The article covered her staunch opposition to fracking, a method of natural gas extraction that has helped make the nation energy-independent.  The Times article also mentioned her support for making energy more expensive through a carbon tax. Moreover, the article noted that she was an original sponsor of the radical and wasteful “Green New Deal” and even tried to stop offshore fracking as California’s attorney general.   But wait, there’s more. Harris’s anti-business record also includes support for reversing the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and massively increasing the corporate income tax from 21% to 35%. She backed taxing stock market trades to help pay for her expensive, government spending wish list. Just this year, Harris embraced radical anti-business ideas such as price controls (which Cuban ignored) and taxing unrealized capital gains. On this point, Cuban admitted the idiocy of the policy.  “What I told them was that if you tax unrealized gains, you're going to kill the stock market,” Cuban said in the same CNBC interview. He went on to beg viewers to trust him that Harris wouldn’t try to do this, before adding a mile-wide caveat, “I'm not going to speak for the Vice President, she makes the final decision.” Moreover, Cuban is no moderate or centrist. Cuban is a fanatical advocate for radical leftist diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. After publicly admitting on Feb. 1 to engaging in DEI racial discrimination, Cuban was rebuked by Commissioner Andrea R. Lucas of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), who called his behavior “illegal.”  Conservatives are under attack. Contact ABC News (818) 460-7477, CBS News (212) 975-3247 and NBC News (212) 664-6192 and demand they report fairly on how Bidenomics is crippling the American economy.

A new nationwide poll indicated Sunday that Vice President Kamala Harris has lost her edge and may soon lose a great deal more. The latest New York Times/Siena College poll asked nearly 1,700 registered voters between Sept. 3 and 6 whom they would vote for if the election were held today: 48% said they'd vote for President Donald Trump; 47% said Harris. With minor candidates included, Trump has a two-point lead (48%-46%) over Harris. The Times suggested the result was surprising because it is "the first lead for Mr. Trump in a major nonpartisan national survey in about a month." Statistician and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver suggested over the weekend that these poll numbers "are just a bit worse for Harris than the previous NYT/Siena national survey in July and considerably worse for her than a series of battleground state polls the Times conducted in early August." "The honeymoon is officially over," Trump spokesman Jason Miller told Politico, "and Kamala Harris has been exposed as a radical left individual who owns the destruction of our economy and our border." It's clear that over the next few weeks, Harris will have to do more than campaign on "joy" and anti-Trump attacks. Whereas only 12% of respondents said they needed to learn more about Trump, 31% said the same about Harris. 63% of respondents specified that they would like to know about her policies and plans. While voters appear keen to know more about Harris' agenda, prominent Democrats have suggested in recent weeks that their candidate should continue to ignore the "nitty gritty" and focus instead on "vibes." 'None of this will matter if she has a good night.' Rep. Annie Kuster (R-N.H.), the chairwoman of the New Democrat Coalition, told CNN, "I don't think there's a real strong reason for her to try and weed out any points of view right now." Secrecy may not, however, constitute a winning strategy. "I don't know what Kamala's plans are," Dawn Conley, a small business owner from Tennessee, told the Times. "It's kind of hard to make a decision when you don't know what the other party's platform is going to be." The presidential debate Tuesday will afford Harris an opportunity to retire her platitudes and provide Americans with a basic idea of how she might run the free world. Nate Silver suggested that "none of this will matter if she has a good night" at the debate. However, the debate will also provide Trump with a chance to very publicly hammer Harris over three of the top four issues cited by respondents in the poll as deciding factors when voting in November: the economy, immigration, and inflation and the cost of living. When asked which candidate they figured would do a better job of handling their top issue, 50% of respondents said Trump; 43% said Harris. On the economy, 56% said Trump would do a better job; 40% said Harris. On immigration, 53% said Trump would do a better job; 42% said Harris. Harris was, however, greatly favored to do a better job on the issue of abortion. There appears to be a couple of issues in which Harris is on the wrong side where the majority of voters are concerned. For instance, 65% of respondents signaled support for increased domestic production of fossil fuels, and the majority (51%) oppose a federal law establishing price controls on food and groceries. Price controls, climate-alarmist curbs on American energy, and other proposals advanced by Harris appear to have a plurality of Americans figuring her for a radical. 'Voters want a return to pro-America policies that actually work, not the weak, failed, and dangerously liberal policies of Comrade Kamala.' While only 32% of respondents suggested Trump is too conservative, 47% of likely voters indicated Harris is too liberal/progressive. Whereas 40% of women said Harris leaned too far left, 56% of male respondents said so. Harris' tether to Biden may also serve to trip her up in November. It appears that a great many respondents (63%) want the next president to "represent a major change from Joe Biden." When it comes to assigning blame for the Biden-Harris administration's failures, 55% of respondents said Harris should receive some or a lot of blame for rising prices; 63% said she should receive some or a lot of blame for problems at the border; and 49% said she should receive some or a lot of blame for the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan she boasted about signing off on. Harris may be unable to shake off her responsibility for recent failures, but she has proven able to shed points in critical swing states. The Times' swing-state polling averages suggested the two candidates are now tied in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. Harris supposedly has a three-point edge in Wisconsin, a two-point edge in Michigan, and a one-point lead in Pennsylvania. Last week's YouGov/CBS News poll indicated that Harris and Trump were tied in Pennsylvania and that the Democrat had a two- and one-point lead in Wisconsin and Michigan, respectively. The Times/Siena poll also acknowledged that Trump is more popular now than polling data suggested he was previously ahead of both the 2016 and 2020 elections. Overall, 46% of likely voters said they had a somewhat or very favorable view of Trump. By way of comparison, 45% of likely voters said the same of Harris. Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Newsweek in a statement, "Polling shows President Trump is dominating both nationally and in the battleground states because voters want a return to pro-America policies that actually work, not the weak, failed, and dangerously liberal policies of Comrade Kamala." The Trump campaign noted, "We continue to see a sustained pattern of President Trump overperforming with black voters (17-74 among registered voters; Trump +5 compared to 2020 exits and Harris running 13 points behind Biden) and Hispanic voters (42-51 among registered voters; Trump +10 compared to 2020 exits and Harris running 14 points behind Biden)." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!