Security

• The Butler whistleblowers expose the Secret Service: It’s both a sign of the times and a scathing indictment of the Biden-Harris administration that government whistleblowers keep beating a path to the offices of House and Senate Republicans. Fresh off Sunday’s second assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley released a whistleblower report about the failures of the Secret Service to protect the former president. For example, as Hawley noted on Fox News this morning, “One of the whistleblower revelations is that most of the agents in Butler that day in July were not Secret Service, and they weren’t trained. They had never done protective work before. Their only training was a webinar, a Zoom call.” Hawley also called it “totally unacceptable” that both Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security are “slow-walking if not stonewalling congressional investigations.” The report itself is damning, and its findings, as Hawley notes, “reveal a compounding pattern of negligence, sloppiness, and gross incompetence that goes back years, all of which culminated in an assassination attempt that came inches from succeeding.”

• Big Tech hides another would-be Trump assassin: In the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s assassination attempt, our Big Tech overlords tried mightily to hide the political affiliation of the would-be assassin. They failed. Ryan Routh is a Democrat. He’s got a Biden-Harris bumper sticker on his truck, and he’s donated 19 times to Democrat causes. And yet, as Paula Bolyard writes at PJ Media, “Anyone who works in media knows it’s a race against time to find the social-media content of anyone involved in a high-profile crime. Whether it’s a school shooter or a political assassin like Ryan Routh, social media companies immediately lock down the accounts and hide them from the public.” They did the same thing two months ago with Thomas Matthew Crooks’s social media accounts. So the question is, Why? What’s Big Tech afraid of? Do they think we can’t handle the truth? Or do they think that since political violence typically comes from the Left, allowing these assailants’ own words to be examined by the American people would inevitably hurt the Democrats and help Donald Trump? We think the latter.

• Vindictive Vindmans: Alexander Vindman was the Democrats’ primary witness in their first impeachment sham trial against Trump. Well, hours after a second assassination attempt was made against Donald Trump, Alexander’s wife, Rachel Vindman, posted on X, “No ears were harmed. Carry on with your Sunday afternoon.” After Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita responded with a demand for condemnation, Alexander retorted, “I condemn you. I condemn your lack of integrity, your attacks on immigrants, your desecration of Arlington National Cemetery.” Rachel also responded by posting, “Sorry you’re triggered. I mean no I’m not. I don’t care a little bit. Trump has been inciting violence against his enemies for years. He douses a situation in gasoline, lights a match, & walks away claiming no responsibility. Look at what is happening in Springfield, OH right now but he wants to claim he’s a victim. You cannot have it both ways.” For his part, Eugene Vindman, a congressional candidate in Virginia, avoided the TDS expressed by his brother and sister-in-law, responding, “I am deeply disturbed by yet another attempt of political violence in our nation. I am grateful that no one is hurt, and thankful for the law enforcement agents who acted bravely and swiftly in the line of duty.”

• Would-be Trump assassin laughs, smiles during first court appearance, charged on two counts (More)

• Suspect was near golf course for 12 hours, records show (More)

• U.S. authorities were warned about suspected Trump shooter (More)

Politics

• Early voting begins this week: With fewer than 50 days until Election Day on November 5, several states are poised to begin early voting this week. Meanwhile, Alabama began sending out absentee ballots on September 11. Wisconsin will begin sending ballots on September 19, and several states, including North Carolina, Minnesota, and South Dakota, will start sending out requested mail-in ballots on September 20. Early in-person voting begins in Minnesota and Virginia on September 20 and in Vermont on September 21. In the 2020 election, more than 100 million voters cast their ballots either via early in-person voting or mail-in ballots before Election Day. It will be interesting to see if that becomes a trend this year given that voters do not have to navigate a pandemic.

• An NAACP poll shows Harris’s weakness among blacks: Don’t look now, but Kamala Harris has a “black” problem. Perhaps it’s because she’s seen by the black community as inauthentic, or perhaps it’s because many black Americans realize that times were simply better under Donald Trump than they are under the Biden-Harris regime. In any case, The Hill’s Cheyanne Daniels doesn’t want you to know about it. In fact, she wants to spin it as just the opposite. As she writes, “A majority of Black voters are just as excited or more this year as in 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) became the first Black president, according to new polling.” To read these words, we might reasonably surmise that Harris has Obama-level support from the black community. And we would be wrong. Way wrong. As journalist Ryan Girdusky writes, “So I read this poll and it’s actually a disaster for Kamala Harris. Obama won over 95% of the black vote. The NAACP has Kamala winning 63% of the black vote, including only 49% of black men under 50.” And yet, Daniels makes Harris out to be a female Obama.

• Satire: Kamala safe and in stable condition after attempted interview (More)

• Two-faced Tim Walz needs to mind his own business: When he first appeared on stage with Kamala Harris at Temple University in Philadelphia on August 6, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz haughtily proclaimed, “In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make. Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.” But if that’s the case, why is Walz now telling folks that they need to have a “hard conversation in the produce aisle” about their vote? “It’s gonna be won in rooms just like this,” said Walz. “It’s gonna be won door-to-door, call-to-call, $5 donation, trying to have that hard conversation in the produce aisle with the person you saw there at the grocery store.” So the guy who castigates Republicans about butting into others’ affairs is telling his minions to talk to perfect strangers in grocery stores about their vote. As long as they discuss Biden-Harris inflation, we’re fine with that.

• Minnesota’s reading failure: Throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it, especially when it’s used to promote things that only exacerbate the problem. A prime example of this reality comes courtesy of Minnesota Democrat Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate. To address the state’s public schools’ failure to teach the vast majority of students to read at grade level, Walz touted and signed into law a $2 billion education bill that he called his “signature accomplishment,” which he boasted would “improve child literacy." With just 46% of third graders reading at grade-level proficiency and just 45% of all K-12 students meeting math proficiency, there is little to suggest that all that spending did a thing to improve student learning. Well, follow the money. The bill allocated $6 million to develop and teach an ethnic studies (read: DEI) curriculum. Is it any wonder that training students in the politics of grievance has not resulted in better reading and math scores? Catrin Wigfall, a policy fellow at the Minnesota-based Center of the American Experiment, charged that under Walz, public education in Minnesota has shifted "away from excellence and achievement to one that is ideologically driven and that appears to prioritize advancing a political agenda.”

Leftmedia

• New York Times sure can pick ‘em: The Gray Lady faces another workers strike just over two years since the paper experienced the last one. This time, the workers threatening a strike are from The New York Times Tech Guild, a union of roughly 600 members. What is concerning for the Times is that these workers are the primary software engineers who ensure that the paper is running smoothly online. Furthermore, the Tech Guild has targeted the upcoming election for a strike at a time when the web traffic volume to the paper will likely significantly increase. And like the paper’s news division strikers back in 2022, the list of demands from the Tech Guild is full of DEI items as well as a number of ridiculous issues such as a “ban on scented products in break rooms, unlimited break time, and accommodations for pet bereavement, as well as mandatory trigger warnings in company meetings discussing events in the news.” And regarding those DEI demands, some are explicitly illegal, such as higher pay for non-white workers and prioritizing noncitizens over U.S. citizens in case of layoffs. If the Tech Guild goes on strike, NYT readers have plenty of other media options from which to get far superior news.

World

• One million are now dead or injured in the Russia-Ukraine war (More)

• Hundreds of Hezbollah fighters wounded when their pagers all explode (More)

• Sweden to pay immigrants up to $34,000 to return (More)

Misc.

• Sean “Diddy” Combs arrested following raids, human trafficking investigation (More)

• Hurricane forecasts poised to be spectacularly overstated, raising doubt about climate science (More)

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