Politics

• ABC News quashes Harris debate rule changes: Kamala Harris’s gambit to avoid debating Donald Trump didn’t work. Neither did her campaign’s last-minute request to ABC News to change the previously agreed-upon debate rules. For example, one rule Harris sought to change is the muting of each candidate’s microphone while the other is answering a question. Harris believed having both mics unmuted for the entirety of the 90-minute debate would benefit her and damage Trump. As Harris spokesman Brian Fallon argued, “Even though Trump said Monday he would be fine with an unmuted mic, his handlers don’t trust him to spar live with VP Harris and are asking ABC to ignore Trump’s comments and keep the mics muted or else they will back out of the debate for a third time.” Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller responded, “The Harris folks are completely full of it. Everything was agreed to and set last week. The Harris people are trying to distract and come up with something shiny to move away from the fact that she’s not doing interviews.” It’s unlikely that Harris would back out of the debate now because it would only reinforce the claim that she is afraid.

• Did Kamala lie about flipping fries? Kamala Harris’s claims about her quintessentially American employment experience are coming under scrutiny. Harris has repeatedly said she used to work at McDonald’s, a claim that would endear her to all the former burger-flippers who got their first job at a local fast-food joint. But it sounds like this might be a big fat lie. As The Washington Free Beacon reports, “Harris’s work at McDonald’s, which allegedly took place at a franchise in the California Bay Area the summer after her freshman year in college, is a recent addition to her carefully curated life story. For decades, Harris never mentioned it, not on the campaign trail nor in two books. It’s absent from a job application and résumé she submitted a year after she graduated from college. Third-party biographers did not write about it. Not until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke to a labor rally in Las Vegas did she mention the job.” This might seem like a little lie, but it would say something big about Harris’s character.

• Harris memory-holes her past: It’s no secret that Kamala Harris is a Bay Area progressive of Jamaican-Indian descent who grew up in Canada and whose ancestors were slaveowners and whose dad was a Marxist college professor. At least not to readers of The Patriot Post. Low-information Democrat voters, though? Not so much. And the Harris campaign aims to keep it that way. As columnist Tim Graham considers Harris’s radical biography, he writes, “It can’t be ‘The People’s Republic of Berkeley’ in anyone’s reintroduction to moderate voters.” A recent New York Times piece notes that Harris’s mom, Shyamala, was “steeped in the social activism vibrant in both Berkeley and Oakland,” and, says Graham, “They told readers that the word ‘Berkeley’ went missing early in her career, when Harris ran for attorney general of California in 2008.” Of Harris’s upbringing, Graham quotes another Times reporter, Astead Herndon, who said this: “This is someone who is growing up really around not only just a black community but a very prideful, rich history of blackness. … The Black Panthers’ headquarters was blocks from her house.” Moreover, her parents made “a very intentional effort to place their children in black affirmation spaces.” And as for the six formative teenage years she spent in Montreal, Team Harris be like: Huh?

• Rogan and MSNBC deception: MSNBC has issued a correction to a deceptively edited video it posted to TikTok which falsely implied that popular podcaster Joe Rogan spoke favorably of Kamala Harris. Rogan blasted the network in a podcast episode, calling the August 2 video clip an example of how mainstream media lies to the public. “This is what MSNBC did: They took a clip of me talking about Tulsi Gabbard and they edited it up and made it look like I was saying great things about Kamala Harris,” he stated. “I was talking about Tulsi Gabbard being a congresswoman for eight years and about how she served overseas [as part of] two deployments in medical service dealing with people who were blown up by the war.” Rogan added, “That’s not something Kamala Harris did. That’s something Tulsi Gabbard did.” Gabbard called it “another example of how MSNBC is working hand in glove with the Democrat elite and the Kamala Harris campaign to try to spread lies.” MSNBC’s statement reads, “We have removed an earlier version of this post that incorrectly implied Joe Rogan was talking more about Vice President Kamala Harris. He was referring to Tulsi Gabbard.”

• Biden’s former Senate colleagues helped defenestrate him: It’s no secret that the Democrats were in full-blown panic mode in the days after Joe Biden’s debate meltdown against Donald Trump, but the details have so far been relatively sparse. Until now. As The New York Times reports, a normally reserved longtime Rhode Island senator, Jack Reed, played a significant role in kicking Biden to the curb: “So when Senate Democrats gathered privately with President Biden’s top political advisers last month to assess Mr. Biden’s capacity to remain the Democratic presidential nominee,” The Times writes, “the decision by the normally taciturn Mr. Reed to be among the first to speak was notable. What was even more remarkable was what he said, according to two attendees: If Mr. Biden wanted to stay in the race after a disastrous debate performance that underscored concerns about his condition and mental acuity, he should submit to examination by two independent neurologists who were willing to report their findings at a news conference.” Imagine that: Senate Democrats finally came around to the reality that we here in our humble shop had been reporting since long before the 2020 election.

• College athletes offered money to endorse Jon Tester: Montana Democrat Senator Jon Tester faces an uphill battle to win reelection in the red state. His opponent is Republican businessman and former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy, who currently holds a five-point lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average. For Democrats to have any realistic chance of holding their Senate majority, Tester can’t lose. To promote Tester, a group called Montana Together has enlisted Opendorse, a platform that college athletes can use for generating NIL deals. Montana Together is offering athletes at the University of Montana up to $2,400 for their endorsement of Tester in light of “causes you care about.” A track female athlete at UMT who received this offer found it offensive: “I had to ask myself, ‘Why would someone seek my endorsement when their values directly negatively impact me?’ Tester’s vote against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act is against everything I’ve worked toward as a female athlete. This vote is a gateway to biological men taking away scholarships, medals and roster spots from female athletes.”

• Army rebukes Trump campaign over Arlington cemetery photo op that led to altercation with the former president’s staff (NY Post)

• Trump says he would have government or insurance pay for IVF treatments if elected (The Hill)

• Ketanji Brown Jackson “concerned” presidential immunity decision was narrowly tailored to protect Trump (National Review)

Security

• Amnesty halted: U.S. District Court Judge J. Campbell Baker issued a temporary order on Monday blocking the Biden/Harris administration from moving forward with its amnesty program dubbed Keeping Families Together, which would legalize more than 500,000 illegal aliens. The order was in response to a lawsuit raised by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and joined by 15 other states. The lawsuit argues that the Biden/Harris administration’s amnesty program would “irreparably harm” their states by encouraging more illegal immigration. Baker agreed, writing, “The claims are substantial and warrant closer consideration than the court has been able to afford to date.” The administration’s program is little other than a gambit for the Biden/Harris administration to grant mass amnesty to illegal aliens under the guise of looking out for separated families.

• Biden administration to restart immigration program that was paused over fraud concerns (NBC News)

• Zelensky floats a Russia-Ukraine peace plan: The wider world long ago grew weary of the ruinous border war between Russia and Ukraine — a war that saw an emboldened Vladimir Putin take Joe Biden up on his stupefying suggestion that a “minor incursion” by Russia would be okay by him. And now, 30 murderous months later, it appears that the belligerents are growing weary as well. As The Washington Post reports: “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday that this month’s lightning-fast incursion into Russia — where almost 600 Russian soldiers have been captured so far — is part of a larger plan to end the war in his country. … Zelensky said he had no intent to permanently annex the region and will present his plan to President Joe Biden — along with presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — this fall.” At least Zelensky is hedging his bets, covering his bases.

• Two men in Europe arrested for “swatting” scores of people, including members of U.S. Congress (Not the Bee)

• Mexico freezes relations with U.S., Canada embassies (DW)

• IDF eliminates key Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander in major West Bank operation (Washington Free Beacon)

Culture

• Fearing backlash, Ford abandons DEI (Morning Brew)

• U.S. surgeon general warns parents that raising children is stressful (Center Square)

• Vermont Department of Health urges public to avoid gendered words like “son” or “daughter” (Christian Post)

• Cell phone bans, restrictions are on the rise in school districts as mental health concerns arise (Just the News)

Misc.

• AAA expecting busiest Labor Day travel weekend ever recorded (WSET)

• Feds violate OSHA standards at thousands of government properties (Washington Times)

• Policy: Make schools bear some of the risk of student loans (City Journal)

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