Good morning! Straight up, if you can somehow manage to steal $1.5 million in chicken wings, you should get to keep that loot. Right? Imagine the parties. Unfortunately, the State of Illinois disagrees. A former Chicago-area school district employee will spend nine years behind bars for doing just that.

2024

🥊 3... 2... 1... FIGHT

Now that our VP nominees are settled, the mud can start flying in earnest. Politicians may not like the dark art of going negative. But bad vibes aside, they do it because, well, it works.

Democrats have been unloading on Republican VP nominee JD Vance for a month. Is he an elitist tech bro with a working-class schtick? Are his 2021 comments that political elites are "childless cat ladies" offensive to women who've had trouble conceiving?

• For the record, Vance says his point was that politicians who choose not to have kids have no stake in the consequences of their policies.

Now that Democrats have a VP nominee of their own, Republican knives are out for Tim Walz. Their topic of choice? His military record (Walz served in the Army National Guard from 1981 to 2005).

Cut and run: Republicans say Tim Walz was running for Congress in 2005 when he found out his unit would be deployed to Iraq. Instead of fighting, he smacked the eject button and retired.

• Republican Evidence: Statements from soldiers in his unit, military docs, and a 2005 Walz quote in which he said he had a "responsibility" to "ready my battalion for Iraq."

• Democratic Response: That timeline is wrong. Walz retired before a deployment order was issued. And he reenlisted after 9/11, which would be an awful way of avoiding war.

Stolen valor: Next up is the claim that Walz has overstated his record by implying he fought in Iraq or Afghanistan. Walz deployed to Italy in support of the war but never deployed to a combat zone.

• Republican Evidence: A Walz quote about weapons "that I carried in war," his self-ID as a "veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom," and Walz not correcting others who called him an Iraq or Afghanistan vet.

• Democratic Response: Splitting hairs over the location of honorable service during a war is wrong. And it's not Walz's responsibility to worry about and police what others say. The Harris-Walz camp says he “misspoke” on the gun issue.

And, because it's silly season, Walz redesigned Minnesota's flag to look more like Somalia's and JD Vance is a jerk for rudely ignoring his son's monologue on Pikachu.

Truth is fuzzy in politics. What's important is that this stuff is out there.

Don’t count on this stuff slowing down anytime soon. You can bet that both parties have full-time staffers digging through every inch of their opponents' histories for more levers of attack.

LOCAL

🪵 Old building materials might be the future

Our collective image of the cities of the future tends to involve lots of shiny glass and steel. If you ask Milwaukee, however, that view may be going the way of the hoverboard (RIP). Skyscrapers are out. Plyscrapers are in.

Developers in Brew City unveiled plans for the world's tallest mass timber building. If completed, this bad boy will be 55 floors (~600 feet) of Grandpa's favorite building material.

• The record they're breaking is their own. The world's current tallest timber tower, completed in Milwaukee in 2022, tops out at 25 floors and 284 feet.

• While that building's main structural elements are wood, the stairwell and elevator shafts are still concrete.

Why wood? Structural timber is often lighter, cheaper, and more renewable than steel and concrete. It's also safe. These materials meet or exceed fire code requirements. When your "DoorDash costs $72, I should cook" experiment goes awry, they char instead of bursting into flames.

• It's important to note that this isn't just a pile of oak. Engineered wood products are made from layers of wood and moisture-resistant glue Frankensteined together, similar to plywood.

• To ensure they can handle the weight, vertical supports and floor beams are built with the wood grain facing specific directions.

What’s the building code say? The 2021 International Building Code (IBC) limits pure mass timber projects to 18 floors. So bigger projects like this require a little steel and concrete, too.

• The IBC isn't technically the law. It's written by an American nonprofit. Cities and states are responsible for their own building regulations. For practical reasons, they usually go with IBC guidelines.

UNITED STATES

💊 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulators nixed the proposal to use MDMA as a treatment for PTSD. But they did approve an EpiPen competitor called Neffy — a nasal spray for severe allergic reactions.

💔 Protestors in Ferguson, Missouri marked the 10th anniversary of the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, which was a pivotal moment in the early Black Lives Matter movement. Sadly, a local cop suffered a critical brain injury after being knocked to the ground during Friday's protest.

🇲🇽 Illegal U.S.-Mexico border crossings in July fell to their lowest level since late 2020. The change is partly due to a Mexican "chutes and ladders" program that continually moves migrants from the border back to southern Mexico.

POLITICS

🔵 Harris: The Harris campaign is slowly morphing out of Biden mode. Part of that means dumping the current president’s themes. And part of that means dumping his strategy. As part of that shift, the Harris-Walz campaign is currently hiring for dozens of full-time tech, social, and creative roles, some of which pay more than $100,000 per year.

• Three new swing state polls from the New York Times have Harris leading, flipping a longstanding Trump advantage. She’s up by 4% in each of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

🔴 Trump: Following a Microsoft report that Iranian hackers are butting into the presidential race, the Trump campaign on Saturday confirmed that some of its internal communications were hacked.

• Trump Media, which owns Trump's Truth Social platform, lost $16 million in Q2 but still boasts a wild $5 billion market cap despite very little revenue.

• Former VP Mike Pence said he’s staying out of the 2024 race. He reiterated that he won’t support his old boss but also clarified that he can’t support Harris either.

⚪ Senate: Last week it was a Democrat (Sen. Jon Tester) avoiding his party like the plague in a Republican state (Montana). Now the shoe is on the other foot. Ex-Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) is fighting an uphill battle to win a Senate seat in deep-blue Maryland and hitting Trump at every opportunity is key to his strategy.

• Over in Nevada, Sen. Jacky Rosen (D) hopes the state’s abortion ballot initiative will boost turnout among Democratic-leaning voters as she seeks a second term in a Trump-curious state.

⚪ RFK: Joe Rogan sort of endorsed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. before walking it back the next day amid backlash from Trumpworld. Kennedy did, however, score a real victory when he qualified for the Texas ballot despite opposition from Lone Star State Democrats.

TRIVIA

If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably not among the ~2% of Americans who watched cable news on an average day in July. You’re probably also a good deal younger than those cable news viewers, regardless of network. Today's trivia is a two-parter:

1. How old are the median viewers of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC?

2. Put the three networks in order by viewer age, oldest to youngest.

Hint: Every network’s median viewer is a Boomer.

WORLD

🇮🇱 Israel: An Israeli air strike hit a Gaza school and refugee shelter on Saturday. Hamas officials called it a “massacre” of ~100 civilians. But Israel claims it was a precision strike on a terrorism command room inside the compound and that Hamas was illegally using the civilian shelter as cover.

🇰🇵 North Korea: The feds arrested a Nashville man for deceiving American companies into unwittingly hiring remote North Korean workers in violation of U.S. sanctions. His remote-access laptop farm reportedly funneled millions into North Korean weapons programs.

🇹🇭 Thailand: Thailand's most popular party and its leaders just got banned from politics. The Constitutional Court ruled that a specific party policy would amount to an overthrow of the nation's monarchy. The policy in question? Legalizing criticism of the royal family.

BRIEFS

• Young people are dumping dating apps in favor of less icky ways of finding love, like running clubs and cooking classes

• Cash App users hacked after a 2021 data breach are eligible for a little payday as part of a class-action lawsuit

• Butler County, Pennsylvania police released body cam footage of officers scrambling during the Trump assassination attempt

• Events at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, dubbed the "no-car games," will only be accessible via public transit to ease congestion

• Russia and Venezuela blocked access to encrypted messaging service Signal in the name of national security — Venezuela followed up by also blocking X

• Stellantis, née Chrysler, will lay off 2,450 Detroit-area plant workers after discontinuing the Ram 1500 model they were producing

QUOTE

SNACKS

🌯 “Burritos:” Humanity has peaked and begun its downward spiral into chaos. Meet the cotton candy burrito: ice cream, Skittles, marshmallows, and five other treats with enough sugar to down an elephant… all wrapped in a big slab of cotton candy.

🍿 Disney: The House of Mouse held its annual D23 expo over the weekend, dropping some teasers and trailers for “Toy Story 5,” “Moana 2,” live-action remakes of “Lilo & Stitch” and “Snow White,” and more.

🎵 Music: Are you a music fan in the mood to hate read a top 25 list? The Independent takes a look at the most overrated albums in history.

ANSWER

MSNBC leads the pack with a median viewer age of 70.

Fox News viewers are close behind at 69.

Younger viewers prefer CNN. The OG’s median is a vibrant 67.

This just goes to show that cable news isn’t reality. Then again, neither is TikTok. (Cable news data from the Wall Street Journal)