The Secret Service has one job: A week and a half ago, an assassin tried to shoot former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, but missed him by millimeters in the head and grazed his ear. Yesterday, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to respond to the agency’s shocking incompetence.
“The official declined to answer questions about how the security perimeter for the rally was established, whether law enforcement swept the rooftops in advance or how many agents were assigned to the event, and said the circumstances surrounding the rally were under review,” the report said. this Wall Street Journal. “Chettle admitted [gunman Thomas Matthew] Crooks, who was identified as a person of interest more than an hour before he opened fire at a Trump rally, was carrying a rangefinder (similar to the binoculars hunters use to measure the distance to their targets) and a backpack. Pressed by lawmakers, she acknowledged that Secret Service agents had received multiple notifications of someone acting suspiciously.
But Chettle couldn’t answer questions like, “Are there Secret Service agents on the roof?” and “Why is the roof open?” Instead, they chose to avoid it and pointed to a report that would be released in 60 days. The hearings gleaned little information and sparked bipartisan scorn, with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) at one point calling the scammer “a bunch of bullshit.” “We have not obtained any documents or information or data from you or your organization [relation] Come to the rallies we ask you to attend,” Mays added.
At times, lawmakers have pressed on why the agency missed something so significant, failed to communicate with local law enforcement and failed to realize that a reported suspicious person was actually a huge threat. The Trump team apparently even asked the Secret Service to provide more security ahead of the rally, but the Secret Service denied the request.
60 days until reporting and 100 days until election: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was strikingly pointed throughout: With 100 days until the election, “the threat environment in the United States is so high, regardless of party, “The idea of releasing a report within 60 days is unacceptable,” she argued. She noted that ten days had passed since the assassination attempt. A report after 60 days is simply not enough to resolve the issue.
At other times, lawmakers were locked in an all-out culture war, with Rep. Glenn Grossman (R-Wis.) at one point asking Chitel: “Can you elaborate on why you want a third of the Secret Service to be women?” Chettle denies she wants this, but Grossman seems to have done her homework.
“As I sit in this chair now, it’s very clear to me that we need to attract a diverse pool of candidates and make sure that we’re working for everyone in the workforce, especially,” Chittle said in a television interview. It is women who provide development and opportunity.
almost all Federal law enforcement agencies — the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Capitol Police and the U.S. Marshals Service — have also signed similar pledges to increase the number of women in police recruit training classes by 2030.
Of course, having female police officers, or the desire to have female police officers, is not necessarily a reason for the Secret Service’s failure. It’s a cheap talking point that Republicans keep bringing up lately: Whenever there’s a problem with an aircraft mechanic, for example, the chorus is that Boeing is obsessed with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) recruiting instead of safety. Another congressman, Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), told Cheatle (Female): “You are a DEI horror story.”
The obsession with DEI is a bit silly, but not entirely wrong. Focusing on meeting arbitrary diversity quotas rather than recruiting based on merit is a foolish way to run an organization. You won’t have the best, fittest people in your work; you’ll dilute the overall quality and suffer the consequences. “They are replenishing the force with agents who had no chance of being successful in my day,” one former Secret Service agent told reporters. National Review.
In the absence of other explanations and concrete information as to how the Secret Service failed to such an extent, sensational politicians will of course fill the void with DEI criticism. This is not surprising. Maybe Cheatle should take their quest for answers seriously and understand the urgency with which they speak.
Kamala Harris could be nominated: After President Joe Biden announced he would resign and suspend his re-election bid, Democrats eschewed a public convention and instead essentially crowned Vice President Kamala Harris their nominee.
As of last night, no other Democrats had come forward to challenge her, and Harris had secured pledges of support from 2,668 delegates, surpassing the 1,976 delegate threshold that means she will be able to officially secure the nomination in the first round. .
“Listen to me, I know the type of Donald Trump,” Harris said during a tour of her new campaign headquarters and a speech to staff about how as a former prosecutor she knows how to go after “fraudsters” and “predators.” By”.
Harris initially received endorsements from Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, California Governor Gavin Newsom and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s initial resistance may have left room for an open and competitive nomination process. But yesterday, Pelosi also expressed support for Harris, as did six major Democratic governors: J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Wes Moore of Maryland. , Tim Walz of Minnesota, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Tony Evers of Wisconsin.
Truth be told, it might have been better if Democrats had anticipated that Biden’s age would be a liability and taken their primary process more seriously early in the campaign. Now, they might be better served if the nominating process is opened to more candidates and mini-primaries are held later in the race to select the best Trump challengers. They could try to do what was historically common (from 1831 to 1968, in fact): pick a nominee at the actual convention, where you’re supposed to do it anyway.
New York scene: “Lawyers for Donald J. Trump filed an appeal Monday night, seeking to dismiss or significantly reduce a $454 million judgment against him this year in a New York civil fraud case, the latest tactic in the former president’s multiple legal battles. New York Times.
Quick click
- How Erewhon won over all the hot girls and created a cult following.
- “The ‘far-right’ smear campaign no longer works,” journalist Melissa Chen noted in a media criticism piece published on the X website.
- OpenResearch, a nonprofit research lab funded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, “found that when it gave $1,000 a month for three years with no strings attached to some of the poorest Americans, they spent most of the money on Meet basic needs such as food, housing, and transportation,” report wired. “But the researchers concluded that $36,000 was not enough to significantly improve their physical health or long-term financial health.” Some claim that news organizations’ coverage of the universal basic income study’s findings was poor, but was influenced by their own biases:
The consensus among academics is that the results of the OpenResearch UBI study have been mixed and disappointing. However, most articles in the popular media (Forbes, Bloomberg, Vox, NPR, Quartz) describe the results in a positive tone and ignore or bury the null/negative results…
— John Arnold (@JohnArnoldFndtn) July 22, 2024
