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Senior editor, Ash Bennington, joins managing editor, Ed Harrison, to discuss the latest in markets, macro, and coronavirus. They discuss how the results of the upcoming earnings season will provide a gauge on the health of the economy and solidify its standing as 2020 begins to come to a close. They also speculate on the ongoing persistence and momentum to the upside in equity markets, short-dated options trading amongst retail investors, and the sudden proliferation of special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). Ash and Ed then debrief yesterday’s FOMC meeting, lay out the impact the Fed’s actions will have on the bond market, and consider whether the Fed really is out of ammo at this point. In the intro, Peter Cooper shares the latest jobless claims data and enumerates on the flaws of solely relying on this data to understand the health of the labor market.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Two campaign aides for Lacy Johnson, a Republican seeking to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), were shot in Minneapolis in broad daylight this week, including a 17-year-old boy.

The teenager was rushed to the hospital, where he died a short time later from his wounds, a Minneapolis police spokesman said.

Officials haven’t officially identified the deceased but his family and school named him as Andre Conley.

“My nephew Andre did not deserve this,” Conley’s aunt, Fatemah Green, said at a vigil for the boy on Wednesday night, KARE 11 reported.

Johnson said his campaign was in contact with the parents of the victims.

“We are reaching out to provide or help secure resources to meet their needs in such a time of grief, sorrow, and trauma,” he said in a statement.

“We have also been in discussions with members of the community who have detailed knowledge of the sources of the sometimes violence in our community. We’ve been in contact with local/national officials to both sort out the situation and discuss short and long-term solutions.”

His campaign said both victims of the “senseless violence” were paid campaign members.

“Today we are shocked and saddened to learn of this senseless act of violence. It is shocking and unnecessary acts of violence like this that prove why change is more needed than ever in our community. The shootings did not occur during a campaign event or outreach and we do not believe it has any connection to their work for the campaign,” it said.

Shooting victim Andre Conley in an undated photograph. (Let’s show Andre some love./GoFundMe)

Johnson told the local broadcaster that both youths “came to me and told me that they want to do positive things with their lives.”

Patrick Henry High School told members of the school community that Andre, a senior, was killed this week.

Over $4,900 has been raised for Andre’s family through a GoFundMe fundraiser. The organizer of the campaign said Andre “had more ambition than I did at 17” and “was loved by his peers, teachers, and principal.”

Police said the other victim, an adult male in his late teens, was taken for treatment for non-life-threatening wounds.

A preliminary investigation found that people were standing in front of a business when a person, or persons, approached on foot and shot at the group.

The suspect fled the scene prior to the arrival of officers.

Omar has not commented on the shootings.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) speaks with media gathered outside Mercado Central in Minneapolis, Minn on Aug. 11, 2020. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

The suspect was reportedly taken into custody on Thursday. A police spokesman didn’t immediately return an inquiry.

Can Amazon fix the U.S. job market all by itself? In case anyone needed proof that Amazon isn’t just taking over the entire retail space (and trying to do the same with cloud), but also dominating the U.S. job market, the company said  this morning that over 300,000 job-seeking people attended its Amazon Career Day 2020 yesterday and over 380,000 people applied for jobs with the e-commerce giant.

Amazon, which on June 30 of this year employed 900,000 workers…

… said that the virtual job fair, conducted completely online, was a resounding success. Amazon noted: “In the span of 24 hours, Amazon recruiters completed over 20,000 1-on-1 career coaching sessions with participants, and another 6,000 people joined group breakout sessions”

The fair was attended by Americans in all 50 states, including D.C. and Puerto Rico. 

Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of HR at Amazon said: “Our vision for Career Day was to help job seekers from all walks of life and career stages fulfill their professional goals, using our scale to support those who need it the most.”

“We have tens of thousands of jobs available – from roles in finance, robotics, software development or AI, to entry-level positions with highly competitive pay and benefits across our operations network. We’re looking forward to welcoming many Career Day participants to Amazon as full-time employees in the coming months.”

The numbers reveal the unprecedented thirst for jobs in the U.S. as a result of massive wave of layoffs and bankruptcies due to the coronavirus-lockdown induced recession that the country has suffered from over the last 6 months.

Additional highlights from the event, per Amazon, included:

• Over 300,000 job seekers attended the event and discovered new tools to navigate the job market and learn about the 33,000 corporate and tech roles available at Amazon, as well as the 100,000 open positions across the company’s operations network.
• Participants joined from all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico – with over 55,000 attending from California alone.
• Since announcing Career Day on September 9, Amazon has received more than 384,000 job applications for roles at the company in the U.S. and Canada – 38 job applications every minute.
• Amazon recruiters conducted 20,000 1-on-1 career coaching sessions to help attendees prepare for their next job, providing a total of 6,600 hours of advice. Job seekers filled the 20,000 slots within 12 hours of Amazon making them available.
• More than 3,600 attendees participated in interactive coding review workshops hosted by senior Amazon software development engineers, and 2,600 joined breakout sessions dedicated to hourly opportunities at Amazon’s fulfillment centers and physical stores.
• Attendees asked more than 7,000 questions to the participating HR experts, career coaches, and industry leaders.

Given this staggering turnout, one wonders if Amazon’s unprecedented growth will also make it a monopolist in the US jobs market.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

I recently testified on Antifa and the growing anti-free speech movement in the United States. I specifically disagreed with statements by Democrats denying that Antifa was playing a role in protests or, as House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler claimed, Antifa is a “myth.” 

This afternoon, FBI Director Chris Wray pushed back on similar claims and declared that “Antifa is a real thing” and that the FBI has various cases of self-identified Antifa members involved in criminal conduct.

As I have written, Antifa is more of a movement than a specific organization. However, it has long been the “Keyser Söze” of the anti-free speech movement, a loosely aligned group that employs measures to avoid easy detection or association. 

Wray stated “And we have quite a number – and I’ve said this quite consistently since my first time appearing before this committee – we have any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists and some of those individuals self-identify with Antifa.”

Wray was adamant: “Antifa is a real thing. It’s not a fiction” and, while it is not a conventional organization as opposed to a movement, they have arrested people who admit that they are Antifa.

I have repeatedly emphasized that extreme right groups are also responsible for recent violence.  Moreover, I have opposed declaring Antifa a terrorist organization.  We have ample laws to deal with such extremist violence from the far left or far right. We do not need to rely on terrorism laws or most recently suggested sedition laws.

My greatest concern is that we need to take Antifa seriously as a virulent anti-free speech organization.  There is a fair criticism of some politicians who have refused to denounce the group or even support it.  Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison, now the Minnesota attorney general, once said Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. This was after Antifa had been involved in numerous acts of violence and its website was banned in Germany. His own son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer.

Again, I am less focused on Antifa’s role in recent rioting. It is clearly involved but there are many such groups working behind the scenes.  My focus is on Antifa’s increasing presence on our campuses and faculty who are now espousing anti-free speech views or views that either support or rationalize violent conduct.

George Washington University student Jason Charter has been charged as the alleged “ringleader” of efforts to take down statues across the capital. Charter has been an active Antifa member on campus for years. Following his arrest, he claimed the “movement is winning.” It is winning. It is winning mostly since people remain silent. Silence kills free speech. Antifa knows that.

Facebook has censored a pro-Trump ad despite fact-checker PolitiFact contradicting its own “mostly false” rating with pretzel logic.

As the Daily Wire‘s John Bickley writes, the ad launched on August 4 was given a “mostly false” rating by the partisan fact-checker, and subsequently banned by Facebook.

The ad directly quotes Biden declaring, “If you elect me, your taxes are going to be raised, not cut,” and warns that his plan will raise taxes “on all income groups.” –Daily Wire

Watch the ad:

PolitiFact then goes to great lengths to discredit the ad – calling it “mostly false” because the PAC which produced it, America First, ‘lacked context’ and gave the ‘wrong impression’ about what Biden meant.

The ‘fact-checker’ then inserts their own logic, claiming that only the “biggest earners” would be hit harder by Biden’s plan, while increases on lower-income groups “would be relatively small.”

Except PolitiFact admits: “[S]ome tax experts estimate that Biden’s plan would mean higher taxes on average for all income groups.”

In other words, Biden literally told an audience that their taxes would rise – which “some tax experts” confirmed, yet PolitiFact took it upon themselves to ‘clarify’ – and Facebook has banned the above ad over it.

More via the Daily Wire:

*  *  *

In other words, PolitiFact uses a Democratic talking point about the rich paying more in an attempt to distract from the fact that the ad’s claim is actually true.

Here’s how the fact check begins (emphasis added):

A new ad from a pro-Trump super PAC uses out-of-context footage of Joe Biden to claim that the former vice president wants to raise taxes for Americans across the board.

Versions of the ad from America First Action began airing Aug. 4 on Facebook and on TV screens in Wisconsin and North Carolina. They focus largely on a comment Biden made in response to a voter during a February campaign stop in South Carolina.

But the America First Action ad presents that remark out of context. And while some tax experts estimate that Biden’s plan would mean higher taxes on average for all income groups, those increases would be relatively small for all but the biggest earners.

In its attempt to argue that the ad is “mostly false,” PolitiFact specifically cites a “Biden campaign official” as supposed evidence of the Democrat’s intent (emphasis added):

The full exchange shows that Biden was saying his plan would raise taxes for people who, in his words, “benefited from” the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. A Biden campaign official said his point was that the wealthy — not all Americans — would not benefit from his plan.

The ad’s portrayal of the exchange leaves a different impression.

The fact check goes on to make a similarly flimsy case against the ad’s inclusion of Biden warning that his tax increases could “go higher.” The supposed evidence of this being “mostly false” is the following full quote from Biden:

“We should charge people the same tax for their capital gains as their tax rate is,” Biden said. “And I think we should raise the tax rate back to, for example, I take it back to where it was before it was reduced. It could go higher.”

*  *  *

Read the rest of the report here.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

China and Russia have introduced weapons to space, including killer satellites, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Wednesday.

“In space, Moscow and Beijing have turned a once peaceful arena into a warfighting domain,” Esper said.

“They have weaponized space through killer satellites, directed energy weapons, and more in an effort to exploit our systems and chip away at our military advantage.”

Directed energy weapons use converted chemical or electrical energy and focus it on a target, resulting in physical damage. Weapons used by the U.S. military include systems that use high energy lasers.

Directed energy weapons can be very effective against swarm attacks, a Pentagon official said in 2018.

“We often think about directed energy as large lasers, and I’ve certainly been involved with some of that for decades, but we also have high power microwaves which can be very effective as what we call an electronics kill,” Dr. Michael D. Griffin, under secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said at the time.

“That sort of thing—it’s really hard to envision handling swarming attacks by purely kinetic means—so that’s one of the future threats that I think we face.”

Killer satellites are satellites with the capability to kill and destroy.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson inspects new technologies being developed and tested at the High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility and USS Desert Ship, a land-based launch facility designed to simulate a ship at sea, at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., on Jan. 25, 2017. (Navy photo by Chief Petty Officer Elliott Fabrizio)

Esper said America’s competitors and adversaries “exploit cyberspace to undermine our security without confronting our conventional strengths.”

“They do this all in an increasingly gray zone of engagement that keeps us in a perpetual state of competition. The national defense strategy guides us as we adapt the force to this challenging complex security environment by status quo and continue outpacing the competition,” he added.

But strong investment is enabling the military to move forward with developing hypersonic weapons and other modern tools.

“Thanks to our largest research and development budget in the department’s history, we are advancing critical technologies to maintain our military edge in areas such as hypersonic weapons, directed energy and autonomous systems,” Esper said.

Esper was speaking during the Air Force Association’s Virtual Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

Following an increase of $3.6 billion, the Department of Defense’s budget for research and development was $95.3 billion in fiscal year 2019, according to its financial report (pdf).

President Donald Trump’s administration officially launched Space Force late last year, establishing it as a sixth branch of the military.

“Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital,” Trump said when signing legislation that included funding for the branch.

The Defense Space Strategy, released earlier this year, outlines what the United States needs to do to achieve a “comprehensive military advantage” in space within 10 years.

(R) Gen. Jay Raymond, chief of Space Operations, and (L) Chief Master Sgt. Roger Towberman, with Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett, present President Donald Trump with the official flag of the United States Space Force in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on May 15, 2020. (Samuel Corum-Pool/Getty Images)

Three key objectives are identified for the Space Force: to maintain America’s space superiority; to provide space support to all joint military operations; and to “ensure space stability”—or to deter aggression and uphold international agreements in space with a persistent presence, similar to how the Navy polices international waters.

Esper said he’s proud of the progress made in implementing the strategy, which will “ensure our dominance across all domains.”

Esper spoke a day after Gen. John Raymond, who heads Space Force.

Raymond revealed that the force’s Space Based Infrared System satellites were used to detect Iranian missiles aimed at American war planes in January.

Raymond praised the 2nd Space Warning Squadron at Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado.

“They operated the world’s best missile warning capabilities and they did outstanding work, and I’m very very proud of them,” he said at the conference.

Trump had said “an early warning system that worked very well” helped avoid U.S. casualties, but didn’t disclose the nature of the system.