Its a news website run out of a house in Bloomington, Indiana, by a secretive internet whiz who had a bit part in the classic Middle America movie Breaking Away. A mention of Citizen Free Press often brings a shrug even in news-hungry Washington.

But overnight, the site that calls itself an alternative to the once-conservative Drudge Report has shot past competitors and is now poised to dominate the right-leaning media space.

"It's fantastic. I love it. I'm breaking every rule in the modern digital news business with no social media, no Facebook, no branding, no email, and the site is succeeding beyond my wildest dreams, said the one-man operator who goes by Kane."

According to the web traffic counter SimilarWeb, he recorded 6.35 million visits and 45 million page views last month. Thats just a sliver of Drudges numbers, but it puts Citizen Free Press in the top of conservative news sites for page views. Plus, visitors stay a remarkable 17 minutes. And it happened during a period when CFP was briefly knocked off Google.

The shift by the Drudge Report from seemingly conservative, pro-President Trump, to anti-Trump, has opened the door to several conservative news aggregators to grow, and Citizen Free Press has jumped the furthest fastest.

Like Drudge and unlike traditional news sites, such as the Washington Examiner, it lists stories from other sites, often with edgy, sometimes rude headlines. Today, for example, headlines include When Obama cut the payroll tax, Pelosi loved it, and Cuomo begs fleeing New Yorkers Come back, I will cook for you

Unlike Drudge, Kane also writes his own posts from the stories of others, and that helps boost traffic because he includes eye-catching videos. And for posts that do well, he puts them in a library under his list.

While Drudge and many websites have stalled in recent weeks, CFP traffic is jumping, up 1,000% since January 2019, and he hopes to hit 100 million page views a month in a year. He told us that traffic is increasing 5,000-6,000 a month.

As with most new websites, building audiences can be hard, especially when there isnt any brand. Conservative pundit and podcaster Dan Bongino, for example, was able to get a quick start after launching his Drudge alternative site, the BonginoReport.com, in part because he is well known and has a following on conservative media circles.

For CFP, its been word of mouth, an organic type of growth that has given it about 160,000 regulars who help spread the word, said Kane.

"For context, in January of 2020, CFP had 100,000 daily regulars. Now in August, CFP has grown to 160,000 hardcore readers, who visit the site every single day, multiple times each, he said. These 'sticky' numbers are unheard of in the news website business for virtually every other site except Drudge Report itself, which boasts similar engagement numbers, he added.

Kane also credits his style of listing news stories, a primitive presentation even compared to the old school look of Drudge, though he copied the style of Drudge's banner.

It's all about the list. I designed CFP to be as user-friendly as possible, so readers can quickly find new stories, right at the top. I try to write creative headlines. I guess that helps somewhat. It's an alternative approach to news, he said.

With promotion and advertising, Kane said CFP is set to get bigger. Almost no one knows about the site. There is no Facebook page, on purpose, no advertising, no media appearances, no promotion, he said, though it is on a path of 50 million page views in August.

There's a lot of room for growth, said Kane.

Read more here:

Citizen Free Press, breaking away from other alt-Drudge sites - Washington Examiner

Conservatism is in crisis. But we knew that.

With the exception of 2004a squeaker that came down to the wire in Ohio, almost necessitating a replay of Floridas dramatic 2000 recountthe conservative movement has not unambiguously won a presidential election by popular vote since 1988.

And that was before Trump came along. Since that time, of course, the conservative movement has been tarred by association not only with Trumps corruption, incompetence, and brutality, but also with the dangerous fanatics of the alt-right and similar white supremacist groups whom he has tolerated, even tacitly allied with. If the conservative movement had troubles already, a key guardrail had broken: the very people whom William F. Buckley and others had desperately tried to keep out of the movement, and who had been seen off again and again, in the persona of George Wallace, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and others, had now taken control of the movement.

Amid the current culture war, and especially its latest and hardest-contested battleground, the understanding and commemoration of American history itself, traditional conservatives have a vital role to play. But only if they go back to first principles: reverence for the Constitution and its freedoms, and a commitment to implement them for all Americans, not just some. These core values, not a thoughtless and unqualified deification of the past, nor a Manichaean opposition to the ideas of others, will ensure that conservative values will endure.

A Zombie From The 80s

American conservatism has always had a spotty record on racial matters. Even though founders of the modern conservative movement like William F. Buckley sought to distance themselves from overt bigots, anti-Semites, and crackpots, their own record on matters of civil rights was spotty at best, checkered at worst. More recently, the law and order conservatism of the Reagan era, however sympathetically one reads it in light of the Boomer crime wave, carried with it a contempt for civil rights and a tolerance for abuse of power.

These problems look quaint in retrospect. Today, the conservative movement looks dated at the very least, and toxic at worst. Perhaps the biggest indicator of the conservative movements weakness was that, at the time Trump knocked it over in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, 16 other candidates had no real solution to Americas problems. Despite repeated allusions to a 1980s icon in the form of Ronald Reagan, there was no vision.

This is unfortunate not just for the conservative movement, but for America. Obscured by the fanaticism and partisanship brought on by Trump, the American left has gone crazy. The left has avoided the much-needed discussion on race and policing brought on by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and instead used his killing as a justification for the vandalism of monuments (not just Confederate ones), the renaming of major institutions, and the cancelling of those who disagree, all the while peddling the argument that the United States is irredeemable.

The response on the right has been inarticulate at best, but its most prominent voice has been a president who ordered the National Guard to use force on peaceful protesters outside the White House so that he could wave a Bible in front of a church whose minister he had just injured. The latest development in this increasingly alarming back and forth has been the attempted sacking of a federal courthouse followed by extrajudicial detention of citizens in Portland (and potentiallyelsewhere) by federal law enforcement with questionable jurisdiction and chains of command.

Amid all this, doomsayers are now all but openly pronouncing the imminentcollapse of the United States. Amid deconstructionism on the left and crushing authoritarianism on the right, we may fear that, as W.B. Yeats would put it, the center cannot hold.

A reasonable conservative, surveying the intellectual and social carnage, might reasonably ask, whats left to conserve?

Plenty, in fact.

On Rebuilding a Movement

There is, in fact, a historic opportunity for American conservatives to reclaim their core principles and build a winning political coalition. In the process, they can rebuild, rearticulate, and revive the American consensus about what our nation is, what it stands for, and where it can go.

What one is against can serve as the basis of what one is for. Indeed, as a conservative speaker pointed out to one of us in 2016, in the short to medium term, one can unite a squabbling party by pointing at something all of its factions find intolerable and reminding them that they oppose it. This, it was argued, was what Reagan had done in the 1980s and what Trump attempted to do and mostly failed.

Its quite debatable whether this was really the secret of past conservative coalitions success, and whether the lesson is applicable now. The real key to Reagans success may well have been the simple fecklessness of his, and his successor George H.W. Bushs, opposition, and the relative absence of partisanship that allowed for super coalitions to be built. But even if it is true, the limitations of this logic have become apparent.

Clearly, conservatives are going to need to articulate a real vision for the United States, and not just stand athwart history yelling, Stop! They are, moreover, going to have to look past Reagan and abandon Trump. They need a new vision, and a chance to articulate it.

The good news, though, is that the excesses of the left and the vacuousness of Trump offer an opportunity to rebuild. Cancel culture, with its internet mobs, digitized harassment and slurs, nihilistic reverse racism, and attempt to shift the climate of intolerance it has created from the college campus to the boardroom is not a viable way forward for America. Indeed, given its origins in postmodernist deconstructionism and its characterization of the United States as irredeemably oppressive, it does not seek to be. The reaction against this over-reach by the postmodern left has come from all cornersfrom the campus free speech movement, to online contrarians, to left-libertarians, to liberals and former Hillary Clintonsupporters, to NeverTrumpconservatives, to moderate free-marketersin addition to Trump supporters themselves.

A movement that can unite this many people across the political spectrum potentially signals the basis for a principled opposition. For conservatives who have historically styled themselves classical liberals, conserving the original liberal principles of Americas founding, this is an opportunity. The challenge for conservatives is not simply to oppose, but to lead.

It must be emphasized: this will not save conservatives or Republicans this election cyclenot in net terms anyway. The Republican Party and the conservative movement are too tainted by Trump and too disorganized to do much more than tread waterif they are lucky. There is no winning this time, and, in fairness, there probably should not be. The question is how to lay the groundwork for a reboot, and what the conservative vision for America would look like in that case.

It is here that we can offer some thoughts.

Preserving (The Right) History

The biggest issue in the current culture war is how America is to remember its history. Without some agreement, or at least give and take, on how to understand and value their shared experience as a nation, Americans have no reason to stick together at alla frightening prospect, doubly so in this age of division and hyper-partisanship.

We live at a time when historical figures are literally being pulled off pedestals, and when the ire of those doing it extends not only to Confederate leaders and soldiers but any historical figure whose views or practices were typical of another era. This has extended even to Union leaders such as Ulysses S. Grant and abolitionist Union soldiers such as Hans Christian Heg. It is vital for some reasonableness to be injected into the discourse. Conservatives, who prize reason and moderation and value historical inheritance, have no choice but to weigh in. They are well-positioned to do so, if they can overcome their worst instincts that have been on display in the Trump era.

As George Will articulated in his recent book, one of few constants in American conservatism over the centuries is its veneration of the Madisonian Constitution, not merely as a legal system to be manipulated or circumvented, but a worthy blueprint for a free society. Limited government, checks and balances, and individual rights are the sine qua non of conservatism; all else may come and go. With them, in the here and now, comes a basic acknowledgement that the country that possesses them should cherish them, implement them, and take pride in them not scorn them. When the conservative movement sided with a president who had no respect for anything but popularity and naked power, it went astray from its roots. It must find its way back.

In doing so, conservatives will have to confront a valid point that the left-wing opposition is making: that American society today, especially if it reveres the principles and guarantees of the Constitution, cannot uncritically praise all of the actions of the great figures of American history, or even curate the list of such figures as it has. Equally, the conservative movement will have to articulate a way to view America that does not involve whitewashing actions and events which cannot be justified under the principles Americansand especially conservativeshold dear.

The way to do this is for conservatives to reclaim the American story honestly, including the nasty parts of which Americans are justly ashamed. Rather than mindlessly take the yin to the woke brigades yang by positing an America that is all good against a vision of America as all bad, conservatives, as befits a group who are trying to, well, conserve something, can simply remind Americans of the obvious: that they have a great (and ongoing) national story, but that that story includes imperfections, wrong turns, and dark hours where the American promise was unfulfilled.

America does, indeed, have much promise, even at this dark hour. As investors have noted, it is still the worlds preferred place to park money: whatever one would like to see done with its economy, it remains a dynamo of productivity. This is not a mere bit of investment analysis: it means that America is still seen, fundamentally, as a good place to make a living and, therefore, a life. Despite anti-immigrant sentiment, people from all over the world still try to get visas to get into the United States; Americans are in far less of a hurry to leave. This is all ultimately a reflection of Americas greatness.

The United States was founded on the noble ideal of the protection of the rights of the individual by a democratic state, with a constitution that is a masterpiece of legal engineering, with an inspiring story of improving itself even if it falls short of its own pretensions, that not only overcame evil at home in the form of slavery but fought it abroad and defeated it twice in the form of fascism and communism. A country of visionaries and practical people, it is almost a byword for inventiveness, creativity, and toughness in the face of adversity. Its final legacy, whatever happens, will be the footprints it left on the surface of the moon. However many its faults and shortcomings, its story is not a thing of no value to be thrown away, and in the absence of others it will fall to conservatives to plead its case.

Reclaim American History; Conserve the Best Within Us

To do that, though, conservatives must enter debates about Americas history not as simple-minded Manicheans, but as opponents of that worldview. The conservative thesis must not be that if the left regards America as all bad, conservatives in turn must regard it as all good. It should rather be that American history is the great story of an imperfect but self-improving people.

To take an example: it is not a contradiction to characterize Christopher Columbus as a brutal colonizer and conquistador and also as an intrepid mariner whose crossing of the Atlantic was perhaps the single most influential distinct act in human history, one that paved the way for the New World and Western liberalism. He was assuredly both. Conservatives can acknowledge the value of understanding historys complexity without simplifying it themselves.

In the current dialectic, conservatives natural role is to argue for understanding and appreciating history, against those who do not see value in it rather than whitewashing it and undermining their own case by doing so. They can, and should, be the adults in the room, arguing for appreciation and, especially, simple knowledge of history, without reducing it to hagiography.

This may be too complex for soundbites and bumper stickers, but is a reasonable enough case for commentators and elected leaders alike to make. Conservatives would be wise to argue that America is not perfect, but that it is fundamentally worth preserving and that its historical figures who made important contributions be subject both to respect and honest appraisal about their deficiencies

Drop the Confederacy; Save and Contextualize All Others

To that end, those conservatives who continue to defend Confederate statues should retreat and retrench to those other areas of historical commemoration where the individuals being commemorated actually contributed something positive to America. Conservatives can and should argue against condemnation of historical figures for failing to live up to modern standards; they can and should argue for appreciating the contributions of imperfect people. But they do well to stop short of defending people who, largely for the worst of reasons, triedand failedto destroy the United States.

This is more than simply a pragmatic attempt to avoid a bad look, but a key element of our principles. Conservatives should concede the point that the Confederacy was a wrong turn for America that was rightly corrected. Moreover, the case for retaining the commemoration of imperfect contributors like Ulysses S. Grant or George Washington, or originators like Columbus who are otherwise almost Martian to us now, will be made stronger if they do not also defend those who, at a critical moment, actively tried to undermine America.

Admittedly, there is assuredly a case to be made in individual cases for retaining old artworkincluding that deemed problematicfor its aesthetic value, particularly in the case of old buildings that often contain too much late-nineteenth century memorabilia to easily be removable. But conservatives should pick their battles: defending a Confederate statue outside a courthouse where thousands were unjustly treated by the intellectual, if not literal, descendants of the Confederacy is bad enough; it is worse if the statue is a cheap piece of kitsch.

In order to defend George Washington and Thomas Jeffersonand, more importantly, the ideas they establishedconservatives will have to prove that they are not the racists and reactionaries that their critics claim.

Champion the Actual Constitution

This is where conservatives reverence for the Constitution can work for them.

Precisely because their opponents in the current dialogue are utopian and fanatical, conservatives have plenty of room to become realistic, thoughtful, and prudentas well as respectful of institutions, especially the Constitution. David Frenchs call for conservatives to become Bill of Rights conservatives instead of law and order conservatives is therefore extremely topical. If conservatives find progressives racialization of American discourse toxic and ineffective, they should substitute something that can work. Protecting the rights of individual Americans from the arbitrary and heavy-handed use of force by unaccountable and overpaid public servants is something conservatives normally support. They should apply that logic to police brutality and police reform.

Conservatives should also reclaim their understanding of the human condition as essentially tragic. Utopian projects with vague goals accomplish little; excesses committed in their name leave no positive legacy. Substantial reform that better safeguards constitutional rights from abuses by law enforcement can be championed by conservatives, even as they reject anger and censorship in the service of nebulous goals. Reining in official abuse, and exercising checks and balances, is a bedrock principle of conservatism. It also helps people.

Build Policy Around These Values

Conservatives are therefore in a position to take the lead on police reform without sacrificing their concern for law and order. There is nothing inconsistent about asking that police to obey legal constraints regarding reasonable and appropriate use of force and subjecting them to impartial oversight, while also being in favor of effective and humane policing on the other. Both are examples of the rule of law in action.

On this, conservatives should be willing to forge links with those elements of the civil rights left who reject utopianism to work together on police reform. Reasonable proposals have already been floated, including scaling back or ending the qualified immunity doctrine and removing investigations of police killings from overly interested local prosecutors. The issue has already found acceptance (and urgent advocacy) among the libertarian right, which was decrying the judicial systems acceptance of law enforcement excesses as early as the 1990s, and whose adherents have chronicled police brutality and overreach in depressing detail. Since 2014, there has been a historic opportunity for the civil rights left and the libertarian right to get something done on this by working together, and their failure to do so has arguably been one of the great tragedies of Americas partisan conflict. Regrettably, partisanship is now killing police reform in the Senate, even as America burns. If one does not want radical anarchists and Trumpian thugs to take over the conversation, it is time for conservatives to start conserving actual law and order, and not its simulacrum. (For those arguing that such proposals do not go far enough, the criticism is validbut the solution conservatives should advocate is to add more tangible policy ideas that support constitutional rights, not recklessly champion a defund the police agenda that Americans do not and cannot support, and not support lawlessness by federal and local law enforcement either.)

Doing this would have involved something akin to implementing the reforms recommended by the famous Republican National Committee 2012 postmortem, or Paul Ryans recommendation that Republicans campaign in minority neighborhoods. It would require not only acknowledging that minority groups have constitutional rights, but actively working to protect them, and showing real results. And if this meant that Republicans could win an election in a city now and then, so much the better.

Although this is the issue of the day, the re-articulation of the value of Americas history and national story, and the end to the hagiography of those who tried to end that story, linked to a recommitment to individual rights, the rule of law, and the Constitution, would allow conservatives to take the lead in other areas as well. This would allow for conservatives to again have a sense of purpose on a broad range of issues such as the environment, science, health care, right to life issues, deficits, and the proper size and scope of government more generally. Only by returning to these principles and having enlightened conversations can conservatives redeem the Republican Party as a party of ideas and patriotism once again.

Find a New Figurehead

That, though, will require turning away from Donald Trump. The only chance the Republican Party, and thereby the conservative movement, has at redemption and resuscitation lies in actively stating that the nomination of Donald Trump was the wrong move. It will not help much this time, but it is the only way to chart a new course.

The worst that might happen is not the loss of the presidency, or even the Senate. It is that, divided and visionless, conservatives will have presided over the disintegration of the Republic they love, when they had an opportunity to save it by living up to their best vision of America and themselves.

Read more:

Whats Left To Conserve? - The Bulwark

(The Gateway Pundit himself, Jim Hoft, didnt respond to an inquiry but posted pre-emptively that The Gateway Pundit has been 100% correct in all of our reporting on every major story.)

It was Facebook that became the first target of coordinated right-wing outrage in 2016, when conservatives seized on a Gizmodo article to suggest that editors of Facebooks Trending section were censoring conservative voices. The story had, in fact, uncovered a secret: that Facebook was turning to human beings, with editorial judgment, to make decisions about what content to show its users, rather than simply relying on algorithms.

A former Facebook employee recalls the companys Republican lobbyist, Joel Kaplan, pushing in those early days to do away with human editorial choices, and to let Facebooks algorithms choose what news made its Trending section. Instead, Facebook killed the feature entirely, and prostrated itself to the right in a public meeting with Republican media figures and a private 2016 visit by Mark Zuckerbergs executive team to Fox News headquarters.

Since then, Facebook has sought to ingratiate itself to the Trump administration, while taking a harder line on Covid-19 misinformation. As the presidents backers post wild claims on the social network, the company offers the equivalent of wrist slaps a complex fact-checking system that avoids drawing the company directly into the political fray. It hasnt worked: The fact-checking subcontractors are harried umpires, an easy target for Trump supporters ire.

Its the fact-checking business that is causing all this trouble, Brent Bozell, the founder of the conservative Media Research Center and a veteran professional ref-worker told me.

BuzzFeed News and NBC News reported last week that Facebook executives have acted in recent months on pleas from pro-Trump voices that they not be punished for misleading readers. Its a sign of the pressure on the company but also of a reality that Facebook wont say aloud: The pro-Trump media is in the misinformation business with scale and energy that lacks parallel, and in part because simply repeating the president often means spreading misinformation.

In fact, two people close to the Facebook fact-checking process told me, the vast bulk of the posts getting tagged for being fully or partly false come from the right. Thats not bias. Its because sites like The Gateway Pundit are full of falsehoods, and because the president says false things a lot.

Continue reading here:

How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley - The New York Times

Democratic convention speakers will include the Clintons and Obamas, along with Sanders and Kasich.

Hillary Clinton will deliver a prime-time speech next Wednesday for the Democratic National Convention, part of a preliminary lineup of speakers for the truncated, mostly virtual four-night event, three Democratic officials with knowledge of the schedule said Monday.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive presidential nominee, has said he will not travel to Milwaukee, where the convention is nominally being held but has been scaled back to just a few hundred attendees. He will speak from Delaware on Thursday, the final night of the convention, in a form and fashion yet to be announced.

Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts will join Mrs. Clinton, the 2016 nominee, on the Wednesday night program if she is not selected as Mr. Bidens running mate, according to the officials. Former President Bill Clinton will speak as well, one of the officials said.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, a Republican who is a harsh critic of President Trump, will deliver addresses Monday night, the officials said.

Former President Barack Obamas time slot has not been announced (or leaked), but he could be included on a crammed Wednesday night program, or possibly introduce Mr. Biden on Thursday to deliver a nationally televised rendition of the-Joe-I-know speech he has been giving during online Biden fund-raisers and round tables.

It is not clear when Michelle Obama, who delivered what was widely regarded as the best speech at the 2012 convention in Charlotte, N.C., will speak. But planners have privately said they believe her address could attract the widest viewership outside of Mr. Bidens.

Mrs. Obama has been spending much of her time in recent days working on her speech at her familys mansion on Marthas Vineyard, and has told friends that she views it as her major contribution to the 2020 race, according to two people with knowledge of her planning.

The big names will be augmented by testimonials from from voters of all kinds delegates, parents, teachers, small-business owners, essential workers, activists and elected leaders, culled from 1,000 crowdsourced videos, officials with the conventions organizing committee announced on Monday.

The Big Three broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC plan to air an hour of the convention live each night, from 10 to 11 p.m. on the East Coast, according to network officials. Cable channels like CNN, Fox News and MSNBC will cover the full length of the nightly proceedings.

The Republican National Committee chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, said on Monday that Mr. Trump had every right to give his acceptance speech from the South Lawn of the White House just a day after the presidents chief of staff, Mark Meadows, suggested the speech be delivered from another ZIP code.

Heres my personal opinion: If Joe Biden can live in his basement, the president has every right to talk in front of his house, which is the White House, Ms. McDaniel said during an interview on Fox & Friends a show Mr. Trump watches regularly.

Oh, Im not going to go there yet, she added, when asked if any decision had been made. I think thats going to be up to the president to announce that.

On Sunday, Mr. Meadows, a former North Carolina congressman who frequently accused President Barack Obama of abusing his executive authority, expressed unvarnished disapproval for the idea, which was widely panned by ethics experts.

Those decisions are still in flux, but I can tell you what Im advocating for is miles and miles away from here, Mr. Meadows said in an interview with the former CNN and FOX host Greta Van Susteren that aired Sunday morning.

Mr. Meadows appeared to backtrack in a later interview with CNN on Sunday, saying that the ceremonial East Wing of the White House would be an appropriate venue.

Mr. Trump, who has obliterated the line between the political and the governmental in a series of Biden-bashing events on White House property, floated the idea of delivering his speech from the lawn after announcing he would not attend convention events in North Carolina or Florida.

Federal employees are barred from politicking on government property by the Hatch Act; the president and vice president are exempted from those restrictions.

Mr. Trump, in a court filing seeking to block the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., from obtaining eight years of his tax returns, said Monday that the efforts amounted to illegal harassment.

The argument came in response to a filing last week by Mr. Vances office, which said prosecutors had a wide basis to subpoena financial documents. The office suggested it was investigating the president and his company for possible bank and insurance fraud, a broader inquiry than the prosecutors have acknowledged in the past.

In their new filing, Mr. Trumps lawyers wrote that even if Mr. Vances office were conducting a sprawling inquiry into financial crimes, the subpoena was still too broad.

If anything, it shows that the district attorney is still fishing for a way to justify his harassment of the president, Mr. Trumps lawyers wrote.

The filing was the latest salvo in Mr. Trumps nearly yearlong fight with Mr. Vance, a Democrat who last August subpoenaed Mr. Trumps accounting firm, Mazars USA, seeking eight years of his personal and business tax returns and other financial records.

Mr. Trumps lawyers noted that the subpoena asks for every document and communication related to the president and his businesses over about the last decade.

There are traditionally three hinge-point moments for presidential challengers: the selection of a running mate, the convention and the debates.

Of course, this is no traditional campaign.

But with the pandemic transforming the conventions from balloon-and-bunting extravaganzas to online events, and Mr. Trumps demands for additional debates and specific moderators, Mr. Bidens announcement this week of his running mate could be as close as the campaign gets to normal.

Mr. Bidens advisers say he has spoken with several of the leading candidates in recent days, and it has been confirmed that he met in person in early August with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. We do not know exactly how many face-to-face interviews Mr. Biden has conducted with potential running mates. A small number of women remain under serious consideration.

Mr. Bidens vice-presidential rollout wont look much like past unveilings, of course. With him and his campaign strictly adhering to social distancing guidelines, the former vice president is expected to appear publicly with his running mate by the end of the week just not before the usual crowd of cheering supporters.

For a candidate whos leading but not enjoying a groundswell of enthusiasm, that means an event that looks much like his appearances since he claimed the nomination: carefully staged, produced for television and online consumption, and decaffeinated.

Democrats, of course, will take it, preferring a scripted and front-running Biden in these sober times to the alternative. But the vice-presidential reveal is just a trial run for next week. Thats when the party will have to recreate an entire convention across four nights of prime-time with no live audience to say nothing of balloons or bunting.

Immodest. Ambitious. Unlikable. These are the strangely enduring criticisms that travel with women in politics, no matter how many firsts keep adding up or how numerous their congressional numbers become, The Timess Jessica Bennett writes in a news analysis.

And those words have reignited another debate about sexist double standards, as Mr. Biden inches closer to announcing his running mate.

When Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia legislator and the first Black woman in the country to be a major partys nominee for governor, stated bluntly in April that she would be an excellent running mate to Mr. Biden unapologetically making her case for the No. 2 spot on the ticket she was criticized as being inadequately self-effacing.

Senator Kamala Harris, one of three Black women considered a front-runner for that slot, has not actually said publicly that she wants the position. But she did of course run for president causing at least one Democratic donor to remark that she has too much ambition.

She can also rub people the wrong way, according to Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor who is close with Mr. Biden. And she was seen as being improperly apologetic after she excoriated Mr. Biden on an early debate stage, questioning his policies on busing, with the nerve to later laugh it off as politics.

She had no remorse, Chris Dodd, a longtime friend of Mr. Bidens who is on his vice-presidential vetting panel, reportedly told donors.

American politics may have moved beyond a time when a female candidate would be asked if she could bake a blueberry muffin (that was Geraldine Ferraro in 1984), but it surely hasnt moved that far.

Attorney General William P. Barr, embracing dual roles of partisan combatant and the nations top law enforcement official, on Sunday described demonstrators against police brutality as fascistic standard-bearers of a Democratic Party veering dangerously to the left.

Mr. Barr, who was present when federal officers tear-gassed peaceful demonstrators near the White House in June, vowed to use the Justice Department to fight what he called urban guerrilla warfare waged by protesters in Portland, Ore., and other cities, during an interview with the right-wing radio personality Mark Levin.

They are a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism, communism. Theyre essentially Bolsheviks. Their tactics are fascistic, Mr. Barr said when asked by Mr. Levin about Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrators Mr. Levin described as antifa.

Mr. Barr has been a fierce defender of Mr. Trump throughout his tenure. But his comments to Mr. Levin were among his most pointed verbal attacks to date, blurring the distinction between mainstream Democratic leaders who have expressed support for peaceful protest and the violent minority of demonstrators in Oregon and elsewhere.

Mr. Trump has seized on scenes of national unrest to build a law-and-order message for his re-election campaign, and on Monday he again called for the National Guard to be sent to Portland. But the Trump administrations decision to dispatch militarized federal agents to the city last month drew criticism from state and city officials, who said the agents exceeded their authority and harmed peaceful protesters.

Mr. Biden said last month that the deployment of federal agents to an already volatile situation showed that Mr. Trump was determined to sow chaos and division. To make matters worse instead of better.

Mr. Barr on Sunday portrayed the protests, which erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as part of a long-term strategy to defeat Mr. Trump.

They were trying to impeach him from Day 1, he said. Its the lust for power. And they werent expecting Trumps victory. And it outrages them.

Alex Morse, the Democratic mayor of Holyoke, Mass., who is seeking to unseat the House Ways and Means Committee Chairman, Richard E. Neal, is remaining in the race despite allegations he misused his teaching position at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to have sex with students.

Mr. Morse, 31, admitted in a statement on Sunday that he had engaged in consensual relationships with other men, including students enrolled at local universities that Ive met using dating apps, but denied he had done anything inappropriate or unethical.

While I am confident that a full investigation into these matters will clear my name completely of any unethical conduct, I also recognize that some students felt uncomfortable with interactions they had with me, he wrote. I am sorry for that. This is unacceptable behavior for anyone with institutional power.

Mr. Morse, whose candidacy has been supported by progressive groups like Justice Democrats, faces Mr. Neal in a Sept. 1 primary.

His statement came after the schools student newspaper, The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, reported that the university was investigating claims, made in a letter from the College Democrats of Massachusetts, that Mr. Morse had abused his position of power for romantic or sexual gain.

Mr. Morse was hired as a political science lecturer in 2014 and last taught as an adjunct professor in an urban politics course last fall. He is not currently employed at the school, university officials have said.

The allegations present a major challenge for a man widely seen as a rising star in local Democratic politics. Mr. Morse was elected mayor of Holyoke, a city of 40,000 near Springfield, nine years ago at the age of 22, becoming the citys first openly gay and youngest mayor.

Mr. Biden has been critical of Big Tech, admonishing Facebook for mishandling misinformation and saying internet companies should lose a central legal protection.

But his campaign has quietly welcomed onto its staff and policy groups people who have worked with or for Silicon Valley giants, raising concerns among the industrys critics that the companies are seeking to co-opt a potential Biden administration.

One of Mr. Bidens closest aides joined the campaign from Apple, while others held senior roles at firms that consulted for major tech companies. And a nearly 700-person volunteer group advising the campaign, the Innovation Policy Committee, includes at least eight people who work for Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. Other committee members have close ties to the companies, including economists and lawyers who have advised them, and officials at think tanks funded by them.

The groups members also include some prominent progressives arguing for stiffer regulation of tech. But the presence of the industrys allies inside Mr. Bidens policy apparatus and campaign and transition teams and his campaigns effort to ensure the confidentiality of its policy process has alarmed an increasingly influential coalition of liberals who say the tech titans stifle competition, disregard user privacy and fail to adequately police hate speech and disinformation.

They are hoping to dissuade Mr. Biden, who has not made tech issues a major focus of his campaign, from following the example of his former boss, President Barack Obama, whose embrace of tech companies helped turn them into darlings in Washington.

The three hosts of a new podcast, Pod Is a Woman, said last week that their first choice for a guest on the first episode was Jill Biden.

Joe Biden was our backup, said one of the hosts, Johanna Maska.

The podcast, hosted by three women who worked in the Obama White House, debuted on Monday morning with discussions of current events, popular culture and, of course, the 2020 presidential election.

On the episode, Dr. Biden rejected efforts to minimize or demean the decision by Mr. Biden to select a woman as his running mate.

This is a major job, Jill Biden said. This woman is going to have to handle all kinds of problems and be a governing partner.

(The co-host Alejandra Campoverdis effort to persuade Dr. Biden to reveal her husbands selection Dr. Biden, were among friends right now, right? was unsuccessful.)

An English professor at a community college, Dr. Biden said she hoped to teach part time, perhaps virtually, should she become first lady, and pledged that a Biden administration would make community college free.

One thing that will create equity in education is to make sure that we have universal prekindergarten, she said. So that every 3- and 4-year-old starts at the same level exact same level.

Along with Ms. Campoverdi, a former White House deputy director of Hispanic media, and Ms. Maska, who was the White House press advance director, Pod Is A Woman is hosted by Darienne Page, President Barack Obamas director of veterans and military families outreach.

As podcasters who are friends from the Obama administration, they recall Crooked Medias stable of shows, including Pod Save America. Theirs is another instance of the increasingly porous line between political operatives and media personalities.

Not that the three were conceiving their show so deliberatively. We didnt say, OK, lets get a blonde and a brunette, Ms. Campoverdi said. We didnt Noahs Ark this podcast.

Reporting was contributed by Alexander Burns, Jessica Bennett, Shane Goldmacher, Michael M. Grynbaum, Nicole Hong, Thomas Kaplan, Kate Kelly, Jonathan Martin, David McCabe, Ben Smith, Glenn Thrush, Marc Tracy, Kenneth P. Vogel and Benjamin Weiser.

Read the rest here:

2020 Election Live Updates: Democratic Convention to Feature Obamas and Clintons - The New York Times

Several Facebook and Twitter users have shared a one-minute video that shows men uprooting plants from a field. The viral text associated with the video reads, Tree plantation drive was started by Pak PM Imran Khan. Look how namazi people oppose it becuase its un!slam!c. Planting tree is against the faith.

Right-wing author Renee Lynn claimed that Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan copying his Indian counterpart started a tree plantation drive but locals uprooted the trees because they consider it against Islam. The video gained close to 10,000 retweets and 4 lakh views as of this writing. (archived link)

Other Twitter users who shared the viral video include Major Surendra Poonia and Norwegian diplomat Erik Solheim. Poonias tweet gained over 8,000 retweets.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Pakistani Canadian author Tarek Fatah wrote in foul language that jihads uprooted saplings to practice killing infidel kaafirs.

IPS officer Dipanshu Kabra quote-tweeted Solheim and wrote, Even God cant bless a nation where extremist thinks, Tree Plantation is Anti-Islam All religions preach that We the people of Earth, must respect & protect all living beings and embrace our relationship with the environment. Our deepest sympathies with @ImranKhanPTI. Kabra later deleted his tweet.

Ravinder Sangwan posted the viral video on Facebook with the same narrative. It gained over 6,700 shares.

Alt News performed a keyword search plantation Pakistan uproots trees and found an August 9 report by The News, a Pakistan-based website. The article includes a video of a news bulletin that shows the viral video. The outlet also tweeted the article.

As per the report, the chaotic incident took place at the Mandi Kas area in Khyber Agency in Pakistan. Newly-planted trees were uprooted by locals over alleged forceful plantation on private land. The tree plantation drive was an initiative by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf member Iqbal Afridi as a part of Pakistans 10 Billion Tree Tsunami, a nationwide plantation drive.

On August 9, PM Khan had organised the biggest plantation drive in the country with the goal to plant at least 35 lakh trees.

Afridi admitted that the plantation campaign in Mandi Kas had been carried out on private property. He told The News, The locals were angry over the unauthorised tree plantation campaign. Were trying to have negotiations with them.

Speaking to Dawn, a district administration official said that there was a dispute between two powerful tribes over the ownership of the land. One of the parties was present when the campaign was inaugurated, while the other was unaware about the drive and uprooted the saplings, he said.

Riaz Ghafur, a former faculty member at Edwardes College Peshwar, had tweeted the viral video condemning the incident. He subsequently shared another video where people can be seen planting trees. Ghafur told Alt News that the elders of the tribe which did not oppose the plantation drive later planted trees on the same land.

Thus, social media claim that people in Pakistan opposed a tree plantation campaign because it is unIslamic to plant trees is ridiculous and false.

Donate Now

Related

See the original post:

Video of men uprooting trees over land dispute in Pakistan viral with anti-Muslim angle - Alt News

The UKs lockdown response to COVID-19 has affected most industries, and in the case of utilities companies, a reduction in the workforce will add stress to a network of systems and devices that require regular maintenance. For many, this has been a stark wake-up call emphasising the need to build greater resiliency into operations. Software helped companies keep employees safe and operations running during the pandemic now, digital operational technologies can also make utilities companies more resilient on a long-term basis. George Walker, managing director of Novotek UK and Ireland, explains.

Utilities such as water and power companies have habitually faced a maintenance conundrum, due to the complexities of asset networks and, in the case of water, an ageing infrastructure. Providing mission-critical services like electricity, water, and basic essentials cannot stop, even during the Covid-19 outbreak. Electric utilities are used to dealing with crises, like forest fires and floods, but the pandemic creates new challenges as they need to manage teams and machines remotely.

While they draw on past models to manage the predictability of demand and the consequences of disruption, they also need to enable social distancing rules for their people. As we all get used to working remotely, right now there is a large appetite for team collaboration tools, like video conferencing. However, most of these are IT tools to support collaboration with colleagues, not operations technology tools that industrial companies need to use to remotely operate, monitor or control equipment.

Regulated utilities businesses are not in the main affected by Covid-19, and water utilities for example have not seen any decline in demand. This will require restabilising the workforce and enabling it to work productively from safer remote locations.

Everybody is getting used to working from home now, but utility remote operation requires additionally compliant, industrial strength software, such as PTCs Vuforia Chalk for long-distance service collaboration. Supply chains end up under strain because demand signals change. An enterprise view of supply and demand provides utilities with many more tools to manage the transition from disruption to stabilisation.

Springtime is typically when regulated utilities such as power generation will carry out planned maintenance, and outages or load shedding. They have to take assets off the grid to maintain and upgrade them, but obviously have to keep the grid running, because those winter heating loads that create demand on the electric supply are now going to give way to air-conditioning loads in the summer.

Dropping industrial demand for power during the Covid-19 pandemic, as much as it is a short-term problem, should be seen as an opportunity to temporarily take generating assets off the grid for maintenance and upgrade. That way power utilities can position themselves to come out stronger from the pandemic.

Modern operations technology tools, such as those supplied by Novotek, allow for remote operations and monitoring of everything from entire electrical grids to individual machines, like a pump in a sewage pumping station. Keeping teams safe and equipment well maintained will become more challenging.

As the lockdown eases, it is time for utility companies to seriously consider and seize the opportunity to connect by remote software, to better manage these assets more easily and effectively. Remote and mobile operators may have secure and managed access to equivalent on-site HMI visualisations and essential operational controls regardless of HMI solutions in production.

Managed security and operational validation safeguards ensure that remote, mobile and on-site staff can work independently or together in a secure and compliant environment. Having such systems in place also supports continuity in the face of any future disruptions, while supporting operator efficiency on an ongoing basis.

Selecting the right IoT platform is a crucial first step. Novotek offers systems such as PTCs ThingWorx, which is a single, purpose-built industrial IoT platform. Industrial market-leaders are using ThingWorx to develop feature-rich industrial IoT applications. With ThingWorx, utility operators can rapidly explore, prove and master the value of smart, connected operations and products, even if the organization is new to IoT.

As the UK emerges from lockdown, the ramifications of months with a reduced workforce and limited capacity for maintenance will hang over many utility companies. Its important that remote access and monitoring tools are not only used as a temporary solution so companies can reap the benefits and increase resiliency to future disruptions.

More:

Why UK utilities should adopt remote operations - AltEnergyMag