Government & Politics

• Biden’s family starts discussing his possible exit plan from the 2024 race (NBC News)

• RNC: Highlights from the final day: Perhaps you’ve heard: Hulk Hogan spoke on the fourth and final day of the Republican National Convention. And, as Fox News funnyman Greg Gutfeld quipped, “The Secret Service removed all the folding chairs.” Said the Hulkster: “So all you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags, all you drug dealers, and all you crooked politicians, you need to answer one question brother: What are you gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpomaniacs run wild on you?” Donald Trump also spoke. For more than 90 minutes. He recounted at length his brush with death. He promised to close the border, a massive deportation program, an Israel-style Iron Dome all across the U.S, no taxes on tips, and he said to the American people: “Your expectations are not big enough.” Tucker Carlson spoke, too, and he got a raucous reception. Former First Lady Melania Trump was also warmly welcomed after having been noticeably absent from the convention until last night. And so ended what by any objective standard was a hugely successful convention. The party is united around its standard-bearer in a way that the Democrats can’t currently fathom.

• Rachel Maddow, Jen Psaki, and other MSNBC hosts use LED screen to make it look like they’re at RNC in Milwaukee (NY Post)

• Court blocks Biden student loan transfer: The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday blocked Joe Biden from continuing his student loan cancellation plan in response to a request from seven Republican-led states. The Court’s action stops the Biden administration from implementing its Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey praised the decision: “The Court granted our emergency motion to BLOCK Joe Biden’s entire illegal student loan plan, which would have saddled working Americans with half-a-trillion dollars in Ivy League debt.” Bailey called it a “HUGE win for every American who still believes in paying their own way.” The Biden administration responded by promising to appeal the decision while ridiculously claiming, “We won’t stop fighting against Republican elected officials’ efforts to raise costs on millions of their own constituents’ student loan payments.” It’s rhetorical jujitsu — and a deceitful framing of a naked vote-buying gambit — to construe paying off one’s willfully agreed-upon loans as “raising costs.”

• Hunter’s hilarious legal argument: It must be tough for Hunter Biden these days, having been muscled out of the headlines by one big story after another. But he emerged recently to argue that what’s good for Donald Trump is good for his truly. The smartest man his dad ever met is now arguing that since U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon has dismissed Special Counsel Jack Smith’s criminal case against Trump on the grounds that his appointment and funding were illegal, then his own case should be dismissed on the same grounds. “Based on these new legal developments,” Junior’s lawyers argued in their filing, “Mr. Biden moves to dismiss the indictment brought against him because the Special Counsel who initiated this prosecution was appointed in violation of the Appointments Clause as well.” Team Biden seems to have its bases covered here, as the Big Guy argued just the opposite to NBC’s Lester Holt recently. He said Judge Cannon’s decision was “specious,” adding, “I don’t agree with … Clarence Thomas’s dissent and/or the Supreme Court decision on immunity.”

• Google buries Trump campaign website: In yet another example of Big Tech’s anti-Republican bias, Google has evidently buried Donald Trump’s campaign website in its search results. Go ahead; Google “Donald Trump.” When running a “clean environment” search, meaning one with no prior tracking cookies, one has to scroll through perhaps scores of websites before finding Trump’s official campaign site. Meanwhile, when engaging in the same search for “Joe Biden,” the very first website listed is Biden’s official campaign site. A search for “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.” resulted in his campaign website appearing as the fourth website. MRC’s Dan Schneider contends, “This study reflects a much darker, more sinister behavior at Google. It is through this kind of data manipulation that Google swayed millions of votes in the 2020 election. It must not be allowed to corrupt our democracy.” According to a 2020 study conducted by Sistrix, Google’s first search result gets 27.6% of all clicks, which is 10 times higher than the #10 search result.

• Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allows Arizona’s new law requiring proof of citizenship to vote in state and local elections to remain in place (Tennessee Star)

• Lou Dobbs, conservative pundit and Fox Business host, dies at 78 (AP)

Security

• Russian court sentences WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich after sham “trial” (Townhall)

• Tech outages roil the nation’s travelers: If you had or have travel plans today, then you have our sympathies. As the AP reports, “A widespread technology outage grounded flights, knocked banks offline and media outlets off air on Friday in a massive disruption that affected companies and services around the world and highlighted dependence on software from a handful of providers.” This isn’t due to Russian hackers, though. Rather, the glitch was caused by a single faulty Windows update by an American cybersecurity technology firm, CrowdStrike. As Fox News reports, the update “resulted in Windows computers and tablets crashing and displaying a blue screen, known informally as the ‘Blue Screen of Death.’” How widespread is it? CrowdStrike says that more than half of Fortune 500 companies use its software. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” said George Kurtz, the company’s president and CEO. Well, then. Have a nice day!

Culture

• MSNBC’s Joy(less) Reid leads the conspiracists: Denial. It’s the first and perhaps foremost stage of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief. And where the 2024 election is concerned, the BlueAnon Democrats are deep in the throes of it. As The Washington Free Beacon reports, “A conspiracy theory … posits that Trump staged the shooting for a photo op, that the wound on his ear was caused by something other than an assassin’s bullet, and that he was never in mortal danger.” This would be comical if it weren’t so despicable. Perhaps the bullets that killed 50-year-old Corey Comperatore and gravely wounded two other men weren’t really bullets? And perhaps the New York Times photographer who captured that bullet streaking past Trump’s head was in on the hoax? MSNBC’s Joy Reid is perhaps the most conspiracy-addled of all: “How come no one else has any information about this wound? … We know almost nothing! Why? … They allowed him to stand up in the middle of that, you know, crisis and pose for a photo and fist pump the air so he could get the iconic photo, and then they allowed him to stand up again outside of the SUV instead of just shoving him into the SUV. That seems really unusual.” No, Joy, you seem unusual.

• Chicago mayor wants Washington statue removed: Woke ideology is inherently anti-American. It attacks the very foundations upon which the U.S. was established, including our Founding Fathers. At first, these leftist iconoclasts tore down statues of Confederate leaders in the name of “social justice,” but it didn’t take long for them to expand that call to the Founders. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is a woke ideologue who recently announced plans to remove a statue of George Washington from City Hall and replace it with a “black Chicagoan.” Social media users have deservedly pilloried Johnson’s plan with sarcastic messages such as, “That will fix everything that’s wrong with Chicago, I’m sure,” and, “They’re doing it to protect Washington from getting shot in Chicago.” Then there’s this blistering rebuke: “It’s understandable that a den of liars could not stand being in the presence of the memory of the man who could ‘not tell a lie.’”

• Adidas “revising” Bella Hadid campaign after backlash from Israel (Fox Business)

• Ex-police officer who said he saved children from human traffickers was actually faking stories to raise cash for his charity (Not the Bee)

Economy

• Ford’s big move away from EVs: Ford has announced that it will spend $3 billion expanding the production of its Super Duty truck line. This includes reconfiguring a Ford plant in Canada that had been designated for EV production to now produce roughly 100,000 Super Duty gas- and diesel-powered trucks, largely used by commercial and business customers. Ford CEO Jim Farley explained, “Super Duty is a vital tool for businesses and people around the world and, even with our Kentucky Truck Plant and Ohio Assembly Plant running flat out, we can’t meet the demand.” What’s not in demand are EVs, as Farley recently admitted that going fully electric on “big, huge, enormous” vehicles was “never going to make money.” Given that Ford lost $4.7 billion on its “Model e” EV vehicle last year alone, is it any wonder the automaker is shifting gears?

Misc.

• “Inexcusable”: Speaker Johnson calls on Biden to fire Secret Service director (Daily Wire)

• University of Florida President Ben Sasse to leave post, citing wife’s health (The Hill)

• Man named Literally Anybody Else running for president (UPI)

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