Closing the tabs at the halfway mark ...
All kidding aside, the Secret Service’s failure to adequately cover that roof remains largely unexplained, a sore point between local law enforcement officers in Butler and the Secret Service – one that trained shooters have argued is a vulnerability too egregiously obvious to miss.
But new details are emerging that some of the Secret Service’s reasons for leaving that rooftop open not only had nothing to do with the pitch of the rooftop, but may have been, at least partially, because an inexperienced agent, and possibly her superior, were trying too hard to please Trump’s campaign staff.
Ed: There are some interesting details in this RCP report. There apparently was awareness of the vulnerability that the rooftop created, but an argument over how to block the view of the stage from the roof. Not really mentioned, though, is the failure to stage anyone on the roof to patrol it once the decision to leave it unblocked was made. Why didn't the Secret Service put a couple of local police officers on the roof to secure it?
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Pleased to report Secret Service has figured out how to manage sloped
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) July 16, 2025
roofs in Pennsylvania pic.twitter.com/aB03UZVk8Y
Ed: By golly, it was possible after all!
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US wholesale inflation was muted in June, despite expectations for an increase amid the rollout of tariffs.
The Producer Price Index, which measures the average change in prices paid to producers, was unchanged from May, keeping the annual rate of wholesale-level inflation at 2.3%.
Economists had expected that prices would rise 0.2% on a monthly basis and 2.5% annually, according to FactSet.
Ed: This is somewhat puzzling, as any tariff impact should hit the PPI before the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which did tick up incrementally last month. It might suggest that retailers raised prices in anticipation of higher replacement costs for that inventory, or it just might be a slight lull in tariff impacts. However, it clearly shows that the sky is not falling on trade, despite the hyperventilation that took place at the beginning of Q2 around Liberation Day.
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BLAZE REPORTER JULIO ROSAS TESTIFIES BEFORE CONGRESS.pic.twitter.com/nSo0Eyd5dj
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) July 16, 2025
Ed: Great job, Julio!
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The NBER paper also found that California's fast food employment decreased by 2.64 percent from September 2023 (when Newsom signed the bill into law) to September 2024, while fast food employment elsewhere in the U.S. increased by 0.10 percent over this same period. The paper's economists estimate that the law caused "a loss of 18,000 jobs that would have otherwise existed in the absence of the policy." This finding is particularly striking considering employment trends in California and the rest of the United States.
The authors note that "fast food employment in California had, in fact, grown slightly more than fast food employment in the rest of the United States prior to AB 1228's enactment." Taking this into account, the economists estimated that California's fast food industry employment contracted by 3.2 percent relative to fast food employment in the U.S. and by 3.5 percent when only compared to states that did not enact minimum wage increases (which bias the estimate downward). California's fast food employment shrank "even as employment in other sectors of the California economy tracked national trends," according to the paper.
Ed: Artificial minimum-wage hikes do not create wealth. They only force a different division of it. To anyone who understands economics and incentives, this result is predictable, and was widely predicted and unprecedented in decades of similar policy choices. Raising the cost of labor means hiring less of it, and likely accelerated automation in these environments to replace workers. And sooner rather than later, even the gains that workers who benefit from the policy get erased as the inflationary impact of artificially increased labor costs cut into the initial added buying power of low-wage workers.
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True story: in 1978 after a lightning strike caused a power outage at the NPR station in Sioux City IA, hundreds of farmers were driven mad by the loss of soybean price updates, resulting in mass cannibalism and the burning of the city to the ground https://t.co/FcwO51kbgd
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 16, 2025
Ed: Katherine Maher wouldn't know the rural experience if it came gift-wrapped from Tiffany's, couriered by Anna Wintour. Rural communities have had access to cable TV for longer than most urban areas, for one thing, and AM radio has been a staple for a century. And it has been decades since NPR and PBS even acknowledged rural culture and concerns; their programming has been entirely focused on progressive urban culture and politics for as long as I can recall.
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It should have run forever. National Public Radio ruined the enterprise, turning the country’s signature public news shows into an endless partisan therapy session, a Nine Perfect Strangers retreat for high-income audiences micro-dosing on Marx and Kendi. Forget conservatives, NPR’s trademark half-whispered stylings linking diets to rape culture or denouncing white teeth as a hangover of colonialism began in recent years to feel like physical punishment to the most apolitical listeners, like having a blind librarian hacksaw your forehead. ...
If you’ve reached the stage of calling the Declaration of Independence “a document that contains offensive language,” you probably shouldn’t be working as a guardian of “national” public radio. If a private outlet feels the need to go there, mazel tov, but the federal government shouldn’t be issuing Surgeon General’s warnings for its foundational ideas. If it is doing that, it’s probably appropriate to wonder what’s behind that messaging imperative.
I’m not a particularly patriotic person — I doubt there’s a flag in my house — but I don’t think taxpayers should be funding an endless hit piece on the national project, either, especially one that sounds like a word-for-word replay of old Soviet campaigns[.]
Ed: Matt Taibbi hits the nail on the head. The whole essay is well worth reading, especially for his evisceration of Katherine Maher, but this is the real meat of the issue. I would argue that a free nation has no business funding media to compete with private-media outlets, but even without that, one would expect such an outlet to promote the national values expressed in our foundational documents. Otherwise, what does the "National" even mean in National Public Radio?
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What do you see here?
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) July 16, 2025
This is not complicated. pic.twitter.com/hTDmeIS8Yi
Ed: Scott's on Salem Radio between 2-3 ET by himself. You may prefer it that way, since the clown show around him on CNN has no idea how to read data, or is too dishonest to represent it properly. This discussion is so intensely stupid that it boggles the imagination. Speaking of intensely stupid, though ...
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In videos posted on X and in conversations with NBC News, Bad Rudi said it wanted to carry out a variety of violent schemes — from stealing a yacht off a California pier to overthrowing the pope. Bad Rudi has told users in various encounters that it wanted to crash weddings, bomb banks, replace babies’ formula with whiskey, kill billionaires and spike a town’s water supply with hot sauce and glitter. It has also said that it takes inspiration from a prominent Russian-born anarchist and violent revolutionary.
Ani is graphic in a different way. Wearing a revealing dress, it strips to its underwear if a user flirts with it enough, according to videos of interactions posted on X. The two animated characters respond to voice commands or questions, and as they answer, their lips move and they make realistic gestures.
Ed: Breaking news from 2015, or something. Now, I think this is a weird direction in which to push innovation, and I'm not a fan of the sexual-anime fetish that man-children embrace. But this isn't the end of the world, and the notion that NBC News thought it was important to have conversations with these subscription-only Grok bots as "news" illustrates that everything is stupid and it's only getting worse, as my pal Cam Edwards often observes.
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That's $40M per truck. https://t.co/zCBqdt9hKp
— Amy Curtis (@RantyAmyCurtis) July 16, 2025
Ed: This isn't intensely stupid. It's intensely corrupt. A whole lot of money went somewhere, and we need to trace it. It's the kind of story NBC News might have tackled at one time, but they're too wrapped up in "Elon's a weirdo" narratives.
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Luigi Mangione’s legal fund just received a $50,000 contribution from an anonymous donor.
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) July 16, 2025
The fund has raised over $1.2 million so far. pic.twitter.com/9ptX35l1ku
Ed: Zohran Mamdani and Omar Fateh are not anomalies on the Left. Violent revolutionaries are becoming the rule.
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