memfree

"In the end, we all knew what we knew before, that ABC's goal tonight was to help Kamala Harris, and ABC did help Kamala Harris," Laura Ingraham said on Fox News. That's one way of putting it. Van Jones on CNN found another.

"She whupped him," Jone said. "She just whupped him. ... Kamala Harris did something great for every parent in America. She put the bully in his place."

A certain super gigantic galactic pop star seemed to agree. Moments after the debate, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, signing her Instagram post "Childless Cat Lady," a reference to a comment made by Trump's running mate, JD Vance.

For more details on the 4chan nature, head over to the Daily Beast for pieces like these:

• "...they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
• meandering rant on abortion rights also included multiple false claims
• recap of daily beast debate tweet/commentary

Debate Transcript: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harris-trump-presidential-debate-transcript/story?id=113560542

PBS (no longer live) updates: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/live-updates-trump-and-harris-debate-in-philadelphia

The incident occurred approximately one block from the stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla., as traffic started to build ahead of a 1 p.m. start to the game.

"How things escalated into the situation that they were in handcuffs and being held on the ground with police is mind boggling to me," Rosenhaus told ESPN.

See also:

• https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/sports/nfl/dolphins-tyreek-hill-arrested-detained-police-will-play-week-1/3411748/
• https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/tyreek-hills-agent-reacts-to-dolphins-star-being-detained-near-hard-rock-stadium-ahead-of-week-1-game/3411787/

“Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said of her father, who served as vice president under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009. “If you think about the moment we’re in, and you think about how serious this moment is, my dad believes — and he said publicly — there has never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is.”

“One of the most important things we need to do as a country as we begin to rebuild our politics is we need to elect serious people,” Liz Cheney said. “Here in Texas, you guys do have a tremendous, serious candidate running for U.S. Senate.”

The audience erupted in applause cutting Liz Cheney off.

“It’s not Ted Cruz," she said.

She blamed Cruz for leading the effort in the Senate for trying to overturn the election.

"That is not somebody to put in a position to be able to do that again," Cheney said.

TL;DR: Democrats are united against Trump and will continue to be that way, but if Trump loses so overwhelmingly that he stops running, then a Harris administration will be stuck with a largely Republican government that will keep it from getting much done, thus making it easier for a new brand of Republicans to emerge in two years for for the mid-terms and beyond.

Harris is effectively an emergency nominee, has few policy proposals, scant governing history in Washington and a history of churning through staff. Oh, and she would be the first Democrat to enter the presidency since 1884 without majorities in both chambers, should Republicans flip the Senate.

That adds up to a recipe for gridlock — and perhaps some deal-making to fund the government and avoid across-the-board tax hikes — but not a Scandinavian social welfare state.

The day after Trump leaves the scene, Democrats will lose their best force for unity, fundraising and enthusiasm. But they’ll have the same challenges they do today with the Electoral College, the Senate and the House and the distribution of voters therein.

The shooter who opened fire inside Apalachee High school is believed to be a 14-year-old boy, a law enforcement source tells CNN.

The source said it is not yet known whether the teen attended that school.

We cannot continue to accept this as normal,” the president said in a statement.

At least four people are believed to have been killed and approximately 30 more were injured in the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, although it’s unclear how many of the injuries are from gunshot wounds, according to law enforcement sources.

Apalachee High School is located in the city of Winder, Georgia, which is a community about an hour outside of Atlanta.

The acknowledgment came after POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump’s operation.

On July 22, POLITICO began receiving emails from an anonymous account. Over the course of the past few weeks, the person — who used an AOL email account and identified themselves only as “Robert” — relayed what appeared to be internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official.

The person said they had a “variety of documents from [Trump’s] legal and court documents to internal campaign discussions.”

Asked how they obtained the documents, the person responded: “I suggest you don’t be curious about where I got them from. Any answer to this question, will compromise me and also legally restricts you from publishing them.”

Instead, it was Nate Holden. archive

“It was Willie Brown,” Mr. Trump, who spent much of the last year hoping to make gains with Black voters, posted. “But now Willie doesn’t remember?”

Mr. Brown, 90, who was mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California Assembly, gave several interviews on Thursday and Friday saying such a trip never occurred.

Turns out, however, that there was a Black politician from California who once made an emergency landing in a helicopter with Mr. Trump. It just wasn’t Mr. Brown.

Mr. Holden said that he called Mr. Brown to compare notes. Mr. Brown told him he had never been in a helicopter crash with Mr. Trump.

“I said, ‘Willie, you know what? That’s me!’” Mr. Holden said. “And I told him, “You’re a short Black guy and I’m a tall Black guy — but we all look alike, right?”

Mr. Holden gave his own height as 6-foot-1. “Willie has to be about 5-foot-6. Maybe 5-foot-5. He comes up to about my shoulders. And he’s bald. And I’m not bald.”

Mr. Brown, he said, “just laughed and laughed.”

Mr. Holden, summing up his assessment of Mr. Trump’s recollection, said: “I just think he makes things up. That’s what I think. He never thought anybody’s going to check.”

Common Dreams article details the response to a CNBC piece about a PAC partially funded by Musk is collecting specific user data. CNBC states (archive):

[...] users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.

Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.

So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.

“What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion, America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure their efforts are consistent.”

The America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30, according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, according to FEC records.

They also quote the NYT in saying Lonsdale is one of Musk's political confidants -- which is interesting because he's at Palantir which was you'd think of as his old buddy Peter Theil's gig. Palantir sells info. More precisely, they know how to intake truthful data and turn it into actionable details. I've no idea how they check for validity, though. Some days it feels like everything on Twitter is a lie and hearing that this 'help you vote' program is also a lie just makes me wonder if anyone is honest over there.

Common Dreams quotes several angry reactions to the CNBC article, such as:

Former Congresswoman Marie Newman (D-Ill.) took aim at Musk, saying, "If you did not believe he was maniacal or evil, before this, well now you know."

They also note that:

Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) publicly thanked Musk for doing "an exceptional job of demonstrating a point that we have made for years—and that is the fact we live in an oligarchic society in which billionaires dominate not only our economic life and the information we consume, but our politics as well."

I'm hoping Lina Khan keeps up her good work (and that Harris keeps Khan as the FTC head). | archive

Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Edward Markey (D-MA) sent a letter [PDF] to the US regulator's boss Lina Khan on Friday after the pair conducted an investigation into General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai.

Honda buried the disclosures about its business relationship with Verisk, which did not appear on the first page, and were not likely to be seen by many consumers.

GM and Hyundai allegedly neglected to mention selling data to Verisk at all.

If GM car owners wanted notifications about things like attempted break-ins and vehicle component health, they needed to sign up for the manufacturer's Smart Driver program, and doing so would quietly opt them into allowing their info to be sold on.

"The lengthy disclosures presented by GM before the opt-in did not disclose to consumers that as part of enrolling in Smart Driver, their driving data would be shared with data brokers and resold to insurance companies," the senators alleged, adding GM "disclosed customer location data to two other companies, which it refused to name."

Hyundai apparently enrolled its drivers into a similar Drive Score program without even asking, if they enabled the internet connection on the vehicle.

The Venezuelan opposition dismissed the CNE's announcement as fraudulent and promised to challenge the result.

Over the past 10 years, 7.8 million people have fled Venezuela because of the economic and political crisis into which the country was plunged under the Maduro Administration.

Polls conducted in the run-up to the election suggest that exodus could now increase, with one poll suggesting a third of the population would emigrate.

• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among those expressing his scepticism after the result was announced by the National Electoral Council, a body which is dominated by government loyalists.

• The UK Foreign Office also expressed concern over the results

• The Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, also said he found the result "hard to believe".

• Uruguay's president said of the Maduro government: "They were going to 'win' regardless of the actual results."

In a congratulatory message, President Vladimir Putin told Mr Maduro: "Remember, you are always a welcome guest on Russian soil."

Khan has been at the forefront of the Biden administration's push to use U.S. antitrust law to boost competition and address high prices and low wages. Khan, who oversaw the FTC's ban on noncompete agreements, has drawn the ire of corporate groups, but won fans including Donald Trump's running mate, JD Vance, for her skepticism towards big business.

Now, big money Democratic donors this week publicly said Khan should not be part of a potential Harris administration.

Prominent Democratic senators have spoken out in support of Khan, including senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Warren said on Friday that Khan should continue her work, calling it "a big reason the economy is growing strong as we saw with yesterday's GDP data."

-- or as Matt Stoller puts it in his 'BIG' (regarding one of the two, Hoffman):

Ok, so it’s pretty stunning for an oligarch like Hoffman, with a net worth of a couple billion dollars, to publicly make such a demand. So why is he doing it? One reason is that there’s a lot of money involved. As the Lever reported, Hoffman is on the board of Microsoft, which is right now being sued and investigated by the FTC. It’s a pretty good gig, if you get to fire the law enforcer investigating your misdeeds.

and thinks it likely that:

he’s going to supply the financing for Harris’ campaign if she does what she’s told.

In other words, democracy really is on the ballot, but not in the way people imagine. An oligarch has explicitly and openly taken over policy because it conflicts with his small faction’s control of American society. And so far, most political leaders are silent.

The only upside here is that Hoffman is being very public, aggressive, and explicit about his demands. And he’s going to corner Harris until she kisses the ring, or refuses to do so. From his perspective, he’s not donating $10 million, he’s making a purchase. Or so he thinks. Now it’s up to Harris to make the choice.

Given the shutdown/attack today, which targeted stations far from the capital, this, ah... did not go well.

Excerpts from article:

Security measures in Paris have been turbocharged by a new type of AI, as the city enables controversial algorithms to crawl CCTV footage of transport stations looking for threats.

After training its algorithms on both open source and synthetic data, Wintics’ systems have been adapted to, for example, count the number of people in a crowd or the number of people falling to the floor—alerting operators once the number exceeds a certain threshold.

Houllier argues that his algorithms are a privacy-friendly alternative to controversial facial recognition systems used by past global sporting events, such as the 2022 Qatar World Cup. “Here we are trying to find another way,” he says. To him, letting the algorithms crawl CCTV footage is a way to ensure the event is safe without jeopardizing personal freedoms. “We are not analyzing any personal data. We are just looking at shapes, no face, no license plate recognition, no behavioral analytics.”

Levain is concerned the AI surveillance systems will remain in France long after the athletes leave. To her, these algorithms enable the police and security services to impose surveillance on wider stretches of the city. “This technology will reproduce the stereotypes of the police,” she says. “We know that they discriminate. We know that they always go in the same area. They always go and harass the same people. And this technology, as with every surveillance technology, will help them do that.”