Good morning! After the stock market bloodbath of the past few days, we bounced back a bit yesterday. In other positive news, the Refugee Olympic Team won its first-ever medal when Cindy Ngamba, a refugee from Cameroon who lives in the U.K., secured a top-three finish in women's boxing.

2024

🥈 Harris goes with middle-aged, Midwestern white guy

That’s Walz. Tim Walz. No “t.” Yesterday, Kamala Harris announced popular two-term Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her vice presidential pick.

• She posted a video of the phone call in which she offered him the VP slot (it's definitely not staged).

Who? Tim Walz was first elected governor of Minnesota in 2018 and sailed to reelection in 2022. Before that, he spent 12 years representing southern Minnesota in the House of Representatives.

• Before running for office, Walz was a high school social studies teacher and football coach. He also served in the Army National Guard for 24 years.

• Harris and Walz are only six months apart in age, so this is (just barely) an all-Boomer ticket.

Walz says he was first motivated to run for Congress after being kicked out of a George W. Bush campaign event in 2004. Here’s a quick (biased) recap of the event written by the young staffer who did the kickin’.

Why? Harris likes Walz's record on issues she cares about and sees him as a governing partner. And he's been around for a while, so he's got the experience to be a serious player in D.C.

• Minnesota’s not a competitive state. But Walz is a gun owner, veteran, and ex-football coach who could appeal to the working-class and rural voters Harris needs to win the Midwest (and with it, the White House).

• Progressives love Walz. Picking him unites the Democratic Party and avoids a possible exodus of unhappy liberals to a third-party candidate.

As a bonus, Walz’s “regular guy” persona won’t outshine the top of the ticket (a common concern with VP picks). The Harris camp reportedly had some concerns on that front with a few other contenders.

Early in his political career, Walz was a deer-hunting, gun-toting moderate to match the vibe of his congressional district. By the time he became governor, he was a doctrinaire liberal. And, matching Minnesota's liberal lean, that’s how he’s governed.

Republicans are already racing to define Walz. They’re attacking him for everything from a 1990s DUI arrest, the way in which he left the Army, and his left-wing record as governor. They view the Walz pick just like Democrats viewed the Vance pick: doubling down instead of trying to reach out to moderates.

The new Democratic ticket appeared together for the first time at a campaign rally last night in Philadelphia. Introducing Harris was none other than vanquished VP contender and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. Bet that was fun for him.

TECH

📱 The Feds take TikTok to court

The government just cracked open a fresh new can of TikTok hate. Two federal agencies jointly sued TikTok for violating a law that requires the app to get parental consent before collecting or using the personal data of kids under 13.

• The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been looking into this case for years. The agency settled with TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly, in 2019 for a similar violation.

• The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed the suit after the FTC brought 'em on board. Both agencies have jurisdiction in this area.

The law in question is the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Passed back in 2000, it’s responsible for all those “yes, I’m toootally over 13” checkboxes."

Here's the government's claim: TikTok is knowingly letting young children create accounts. It's purposely collecting their private information. And it's using that information to target them via ads in other apps trying to push them back into the Tok. The alleged violations extend to the app's so-called "Kids Mode."

• If the government wins on this, the result is likely to be a huge fine.

But the upcoming TikTok ban is still in effect (though TikTok is challenging it in court). Unless ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, reverses course and sells TikTok, we'll say goodbye early next year and start pretending to enjoy Insta Stories.

UNITED STATES

⚖️ Google has an illegal monopoly in search. A federal judge ruled the company's search engine "is the only real choice" in response to a lawsuit from the Department of Justice (DOJ). The remedy could be anything from forcing Google out of its spot as iPhone's default search engine to full-on breaking up the company. Don’t hold your breath, though. This process could take a few years to play out.

🔱 Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered extra U.S. warships and combat aircraft to the Middle East. Things are heating up in the region but this doesn't mean U.S. troops are going to war. The move is likely designed to help Israel shoot down an expected fresh round of Iranian missiles. In response to regional tensions, the State Department maxed out its Lebanon Travel Advisory to "Level 4: Do Not Travel."

POLITICS

🔴 Donald Trump will be sentenced on September 18 for his felony convictions in New York. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a plan from the attorney general of Missouri to delay Trump's sentencing.

🔵 Kamala Harris broke a barrier that Joe Biden couldn’t quite manage to tackle: She took the lead over Donald Trump in the polling average (literally the average of all major polls). Harris now leads by a cool half a percent. Democrats are no doubt happy with their decision to dump Biden overboard. But don’t get too excited. Kamalamania likely won’t last forever.

🔴 House Republicans are planning an ambitious push into deep-blue Democratic territory. Their campaign arm, the NRCC, released a playbook of two dozen targeted House seats that voted for President Biden in 2020 by margins of up to 16 points.

🔵 Before the Walz pick, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) took himself out of the Harris veepstakes over concerns that his Republican lieutenant governor (they’re elected separately) would wreak havoc while he was off campaigning. Many states have a goofy system wherein the lieutenant governor temporarily becomes governor if the real governor leaves the state. This has, um, caused problems before.

🔵 Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), a progressive and AOC ally, lost her Democratic primary last night to a more establishment-oriented challenger. Prosecutor Wesley Bell successfully tagged Bush as ineffective and more concerned with Washington than her constituents in St. Louis.

⚪ RIP Pennsylvania TVs. Now that Florida’s gone Republican, the Trump and Harris camps view Pennsylvania as the new king of swing states. And they’ve got the ad dollars to prove it. The state’s about to get bombarded with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of campaign ads. So, if you live there, um, maybe just go outside? Or upgrade to the ad-free plan til this all blows over.

TRIVIA

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott got married last weekend. Back in his single days (read: a few months ago), Scott ran for president. His status as a bachelor was a mild point of contention in that campaign, as only one president has ever been a lifelong bachelor. Who is the only U.S. president to never marry?

Hint: He’s also commonly ranked as the worst president in history. These two qualities are perhaps not unrelated.

WORLD

🇧🇩 Bangladesh: Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus will take charge here on an interim basis to fill the void. Bangladesh’s longtime corrupt ex-prime minister resigned and fled the country on Monday amid a series of deadly protests. She’s now living in exile in an undisclosed hidey-hole in neighboring India.

🇮🇱 Israel: The Middle East is a busy place these days. Israel attacked Hezbollah terrorist positions in neighboring Lebanon. Iran is about to strike Israel. And Hamas put the guy who planned the October 7th massacre in charge of its whole operation after Israel killed the last guy... in Iran (hence the Iranian strike).

🇬🇧 United Kingdom: The Brits are going off right now. After three children were murdered last week in a knife attack, protestors launched a nationwide anti-immigration crusade. The protests descended into violent, fiery riots, and police arrested ~150 people, but the unrest continues.

BRIEFS

• The war in Ukraine may have burst its borders as Russia claims Ukraine launched a deadly offensive inside Russian territory

• RIP Chromecast — Google is dumping the streaming device line in favor of its new, totally different, way cooler Google TV Streamer

• Elon Musk's X sued an advertising group, claiming the group's ad boycott of the platform violated antitrust laws

• Elon Musk also sued OpenAI, saying the company he helped found in 2015 wrongly abandoned its original nonprofit mission

• The U.S. military completed its withdrawal from the West African country of Niger, marking the loss of a key regional ally

• Engineer and industry vet Kelly Ortberg takes over as Boeing CEO tomorrow smack in the middle of a long-term company dumpster fire

• A Pakistani man with ties to Iran was arrested for trying to hire undercover FBI agents to assassinate Trump

QUOTE

SNACKS

🥸 Read: Smithsonian Magazine has a wild story about the 1960 Olympics and how the CIA recruited Team USA to convince their Soviet counterparts to defect.

🤖 Robot: Combo nacho robotics-AI company Figure dropped a video showing off its AI-powered, humanoid Figure 2 robot. The chances are not zero that, a few years from now, we all own a C3PO.

ANSWER

Way back in 1856, Americans elected lifelong bachelor James Buchanan to the White House. Buchanan was engaged once but she broke it off and died soon after. Buchanan claimed he never married again due to devotion to his lost love, but many historians think he was gay and in a relationship with a fellow Senator.

Buchanan served in a wide variety of government posts for decades before winning the big chair. But he often ranks dead last as president for failing to prevent the Civil War that immediately followed his term. So who knows? Maybe experience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.