07/23/24
Good morning! It’s Tuesday, July 23rd.
National Gorgeous Grandma Day
I don’t really know what to do with this but Grandma’s are great and I loved mine so there.
And now, the news.
CrowdStrike Update
-via ABC News
Alright, so it turns out there was, actually, more news than just President Biden stepping out of the race so let’s start with an update on the CrowdStrike failure. On Friday, a company called CrowdStrike, which is a security firm, sent out an update that caused the about 8.5 million machines that use Microsoft Windows to just… fail. Big time.
It disrupted flights, 911 in certain states, and businesses and banking all over the country.
Remember when we were all so scared of Y2K? And then nothing happened? This feels like what we thought would happen.
Well it sounds like they’ve fixed most of the problems but wrote on Sunday that they’re working on fixing the problem so it doesn’t happen again.
The problem? Well sometimes the office cat gets in there and you can’t train a cat (unless you’re me because I trained my cat to sit, play goalie, roll over, and say hi. She used to do fetch but it got forgotten and why yes I do have friends that I see sometimes why do you ask?)
Lina Khan, the chair of the FTC, wrote on Sunday: “All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers,” adding “Millions of people and businesses pay the price. These incidents reveal how concentration can create fragile systems.”
Sure feels like someone should do something about that.
Secret Service Director Testifies
-via AP News
On Monday Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle appeared before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee in the first hearing since the assassination attempt against former President Trump.
In the hearing, she called the attempt the “most significant operational failure” by the agency in decades.
She noted that the Secret Service was told about a suspicious person, who ended up being Crooks, two to five times before the shooting and that the roof that Crooks shot from was clocked as a potential point of vulnerability in a scout before the shooting.
Still, she maintains that she will not be quitting her job and when House Rep Nancy Mace suggested she started writing her letter of resignation, Cheatle told her “no thank you” which is so funny to me.
Hey, time to quite your job for this huge massive, historically bad, failure.
Oh, no thank you. Thanks for the suggestion, but no thanks to me taking it.
Republican chair, James Comer, and the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin signed onto a letter together calling on her to step down.
And then Comer was like, hey while we’re both here on this letter, do you want to hang out some time? Check yes or no. And Raskin pretended like he just never saw that draft and now it’s even more awkward than normal!
Anyway, to quote Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “It has been 10 days since an assassination attempt on a former president of the United States. Regardless of party, there need to be answers.”
We need to know more about this and we need to know more about Trump’s health post-shooting. We haven’t even seen the bullet! What would happen if I saw it? I don’t know, I guess it does nothing but I feel like by now there should be way more information about all of this and I will continue to ring this bell.
Harris for President
But of course the big news is still… Kamala Harris 2024.
On Monday, Kamala Harris continued to bring the dems into an array unlike any other – with more than 1,000 delegates pledging their support for Harris in the convention, Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries adding their names to the seemingly unending list of supporters, and not one single defection saying they want to run against her.
Even little Joey Manchy. Oh no Joey! Whatever will we do without your voice in American politics? I guess continue unbothered.
Oh I’m thinking about running. Some thoughts should be inside thoughts.
Though it is hilarious to me that he was like maybeeeee and everyone was dunked on him so hard that he just pulled up anchor and went about his day.
Still no decision has been made for Vice President but to be far, she just got the homework assignment a few hours ago. Let her Alta Vista her options!
In the first 24-hours since the announcement that President Biden was dropping out of the race and putting his support behind Kamala, her campaign says they have raised more than $81 million.
This is a record-breaking number, a stunning 60% of which came from first time donors.
ActBlue processed more than $90 million in donations in that same period of time, which means this news is also reinvigorating down-ballot races that desperately needed the juice.
This is all happening so fast that, just like yesterday, by the time you hear this, those numbers will be in the rearview mirror again.
If you, like me, woke up on Monday to emails and texts from folks asking what they can do to take advantage of this energy and get their friends, family, and community voting… direct folks to raisingvoters.org/beavoter. We are totally nonpartisan and help make election day a little easier for everyone.
raisingvoters.org/beavoter – take the pledge. Be a voter.
This whole this turns on turnout.
And that’s it. That’s the news.
What a time! I’m proud of Grandma’s. I had some absolute A+s in my life.
And because you are also an A+… I’m proud of you.