Looks like the biggest story from last night was that an untethered Trump is eminently beatable. Didn’t watch the speech. Did you?:
The new tone lasted 17 minutes.
Then, he called on state and federal prosecutors to drop all four criminal cases against him, including the one in which he was convicted of 34 felony counts in May.
“The Democrat party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labeling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy,” he said.
At the 25 minute mark, Trump called former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy.” Eight minutes later, he accused Democrats of cheating in elections. Four minutes later, he insulted the news media, referring to the CBS News program “Face the Nation” as “Deface the Nation.”
And 38 minutes in, he repeated the lie that he used to incite the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol — that the 2020 election had been stolen from him through cheating. Immediately after that, he made liars out of staffers who had told reporters that he would never mention the name of the man who had defeated him, claiming Biden, by name, was worse than the previous 10 worst presidents combined.
Josh Marshall’s Reasonable Take On Biden:
It looks like there’s a really good chance we’re going to get a change at the top of the ticket. Big, unprecedented, historic development. This isn’t to advocate a point or change anyone’s mind. I simply think it’s important to say this so everyone understands it. We have a lot of assumptions about the November election, we have a lot of gut instincts, certainly, since the debate. But the only thing we have that is somewhat objective is polling data. I think a lot of people have this idea that Biden is dead in the water and basically can’t win and that is the backdrop for their thinking about changing candidates. That may be true. But by the data there’s really little to no evidence for that. Biden’s behind, but not by much. He’s the underdog, certainly. But the most decisive part of the election season hasn’t even happened yet.
Here’s the second topic. Like many others, I was surprised by Joe Biden’s performance and I’ve wondered a lot about just what happened. I’ve spoken to a lot of people over the last couple weeks. And I have the strong impression that President Biden’s physical condition declined markedly and quite recently.
That fundraiser out in Los Angeles has gotten a lot of public attention because of George Clooney’s entry into the discussion. I’ve spoken to a lot of people about this. And there were a lot of people at that fundraiser who see Biden often. They’re people who know people who see him constantly. Apparently quite a few people saw Biden then and thought he had physically deteriorated a lot since they’d seen him last. I say “physically” because I get the sense that people weren’t really focused on cognitive issues. It’s was physical. That he had aged a lot, even in the estimation of people who had seen him very recently.
‘Largest IT Outage In History’. I hope you weren’t one of the tens of millions who were impacted:
Airports, health services and businesses across the US have been knocked offline by the Microsoft outage caused by a CrowdStrike software update. Here’s what we know so far about impacts on the US:
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The Federal Aviation Administration shut down operations due to the outage. There were about 110,000 commercial flights scheduled worldwide on Friday. By 6am ET, nearly 1,400 of them had been cancelled, according to reports.
Everything you didn’t know about Crowdstrike:
According to its website, Crowdstrike launched in 2012 and currently has the “world’s most advanced cloud-native platform that protects and enables the people, processes and technologies that drive modern enterprise.”
We close with a sentence from a to-be-unnamed reporter from a Delaware media outlet:
“Beer cans were found near his vehicle, smelled like alcohol and failed various tests of sobriety.”
What do you expect beer cans to smell like?
What do you want to talk about?