Economy

• An awful jobs report: Joe Biden may no longer be running for reelection, but his pick to replace him will have a hard time avoiding blame for the scourge of Bidenomics. The latest case in point is July’s abysmal jobs report in which job growth dropped sharply while unemployment “unexpectedly rose to the highest level in nearly three years.” As Fox Business reports, “The Labor Department reported Friday that employers added 114,000 jobs in July, missing the 175,000 gain forecast by LSEG economists. The unemployment rate also unexpectedly inched higher to 4.3% against expectations that it would hold steady at 4.1%. It marked the highest level for the jobless rate since October 2021.” Adding insult to injury, the June jobs numbers were revised downward. Says analyst Becky Frankiewicz: “With across-the-board cooling, we have lost most of the gains we saw from the first quarter of the year.”

Politics

• Google hides Trump searches, interferes in election: For years, we’ve documented the evil that is Google — the evil that rigs its search results against conservative speech and against conservative political candidates. These days, Google is redirecting users who search on Donald Trump’s name to instead give them news about VP Kamala Harris. Elon Musk noticed this discrepancy a few days ago, and the Media Research Center has since confirmed that when Google users “search for ‘donald trump’ or ‘trump rally,’ the banner with news results listed Harris’s name.” For example, as MRC reports: “‘Harris keeps calling Trump and Vance "weird.” Here’s why,’ read[s] a headline by the Associated Press piece shown second.“ The third result? A Washington Post headline that reads, "Trump, with a history of sexist attacks, again faces a female opponent.” Kansas Republican Senator Roger Marshall has opened a related investigation into why Google is suppressing the search results into the Trump assassination attempt.

• Humor: “Did you mean: Donate to Kamala Harris?” Google asks user searching for info on Trump (Babylon Bee)

• GOP senators block a sneaky-bad bill: Those sneaky Democrats tried to get a fast one by Republicans, but thankfully, Senate Republicans sniffed it out and blocked it. By a 48-44 vote, the bipartisan tax bill that passed the House went down in the Senate as Republicans recognized the poison pill within. The bill was designed to entice Republicans by renewing popular expiring business tax provisions in exchange for expanding eligibility for the $2,000 child tax credit. That would have been a recipe for creating more government dependency and a stepping stone toward universal basic income. The bill would have given cash to parents who paid no income tax. The current income threshold for a parent of three children to qualify for the child tax credit is roughly $34,500. The Democrats wanted to drop the threshold to roughly $13,000. Doing so would incentivize poverty, which is bad for children, rather than incentivize employment, which grows responsibility and encourages self-advancement. But it also makes people less dependent on government, which Democrats don’t want.

• Probe into Merchan’s daughter: On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee initiated an investigation into Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, over her connection with and past campaign work for Kamala Harris. Of specific concern is the fact that Judge Merchan, who presided over Manhattan DA Alan Bragg’s prosecution of Donald Trump for hush-money payments, refused to recuse himself despite the obvious conflict of interest. The committee sent a four-page letter to Ms. Merchan alerting her to the investigation and requesting records related to her and her company’s working with Harris and Democrats. The letter, written by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), observed, “At a minimum, there is a perception that [Ms. Merchan] and Authentic Campaigns [the company she heads] could profit considerably from President Trump’s prosecution in a forum overseen by your father.” Ms. Merchan has until August 8 to comply and send the requested documents.

Security

• U.S. boosts Philippines aid amid Chinese maritime moves (DW)

• Republican senators: Secret Service’s “political leadership” allowed Trump shooting (Breitbart)

• Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Army recruiting flop: Joe Biden’s woke military continues to woefully underperform in its recruiting efforts, and a recent attempt to bring some Hollywood star power to bear on the problem has apparently blown up in their faces. As Breitbart reports, “A partnership between the U.S. Army and … Johnson to help boost falling enlistment figures has reportedly backfired, resulting in an $11 million loss with nothing to show for it. The high-profile marketing deal likely didn’t lead to a single new Army recruit, according to a report from Military.com, which reviewed internal documents. … To make matters worse, the partnership could have actually hurt Army recruitment, with a projected loss of 38 enlistments.” Perhaps this failure might have something to do with the fact that Johnson endorsed the same awful administration that’s now responsible for our woke military’s inability to recruit young warriors — though, to his credit, he won’t be doing that again.

Good News

• Florida bans NewsGuard contracts: Florida continues to establish the template for how Republicans can effectively combat the Left and the furtherance of its anti-America agenda. The latest example of this comes courtesy of Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, who trotted out a new rule banning state government agencies from partnerships with speech-censorship media-rating outfits like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index. As Patronis explained, these outfits “are often rooted in political disagreements, subjective biases, and viewpoint discrimination, rather than factual inaccuracies, thereby amounting to censorship and blacklisting.” Therefore, “No taxpayer money from my agency will fund censorship on my watch, and no Florida business should suffer simply because it expresses views that these groups don’t like.” He added that these outfits “appear to be part of a larger effort to create social credit scores, similar to ESG, that result in debanking and deplatforming legitimate private entities. That’s wrong, and I will use my authority as CFO to protect businesses and consumers against these abusive tactics.”

• Ohio removes hundreds of noncitizens from voter rolls: Ohio is taking voter integrity seriously, as the Buckeye State has been engaged in cleaning up its voter rolls prior to the November election. In so doing, the state discovered 499 noncitizens who had been registered to vote. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose ordered these noncitizens removed from the voter rolls, stating, “I swore an oath to uphold the constitution of our state, and that document clearly states that only United States citizens can participate in Ohio elections. That means I’m duty-bound to make sure people who haven’t yet earned citizenship in this country aren’t voting.” LaRose added that should any of these noncitizens eventually become U.S. citizens, then “I’ll be the first one to congratulate them and welcome them to the franchise, but until then the law requires us to remove ineligible registrations to prevent illegal voting.” This should be the standard position of every state attorney general no matter their party affiliation. LaRose has also noted that roughly 155,000 names have been removed from state voter rolls after it was determined they were abandoned and inactive for at least four consecutive years.

• Michigan improves its voter integrity: If Kamala Harris can’t keep the Democrats’ so-called blue wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin intact, she’ll be toast on November 5. And Michigan just became a heavier lift than it was four years ago thanks to a judge’s ruling in favor of election integrity — specifically, that the lax guidance on ballot signature verification being provided by the state’s Democrat secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, is in violation of the state’s constitution. As The Federalist reports, “Benson, the defendant in the case, issued a December 2023 manual instructing clerks in more than a thousand municipal and township jurisdictions that ‘voter signatures are entitled to an initial presumption of validity.’ Benson’s lawyers tried to argue the validity presumption was not prescribed, just a more modest ‘initial’ presumption.” Sounds to us like Benson was employing a variation of the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” approach, and we’re happy to see that at least one judge isn’t buying it.

Misc.

• Abraham Hamadeh wins Republican primary for Arizona’s 8th congressional district (RedState)

• Fired CNN anchor Don Lemon sues Elon Musk over canceled X deal (NY Post)

• South Carolina Supreme Court approves firing squad, other execution methods for death penalty (Daily Caller)

• U.S. declares Maduro rival Gonzalez winner of Venezuelan presidential election (Washington Examiner)

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