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QUOTE OF THE DAY
"Our state appetizer, calamari, is available in all 50 states." — Rhode Island State Democratic Party Chair Joseph M. McNamara, interrupting his state's roll-call endorsement of Joe Biden to tout the local seafood.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
Postmaster General will suspend all service changes till after the election. In the face of immense public outcry, Louis DeJoy said he'll delay his operational reforms until after the election, Post offices will maintain retail hours; overtime will be permitted; mail-processing facilities won't be cut back.
Rave reviews for the second night of the Democratic convention. The party officially nominated Biden for president with a glorious, coast-to-coast (and beyond) video montage from 57 states, territories, and districts. Jill Biden also gave a much-praised speech, and more Republicans (Cindy McCain, Colin Powell) to explain why they're choosing a Democrat over Trump. Tonight is star-studded: Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Barack Obama will headline, and Kamala Harris' will give her much anticipated acceptance speech.
Top health officials delayed emergency FDA approval of blood plasma COVID treatment. The FDA was poised to approve the treatment, which is derived from survivors of Covid, but last week Anthony Fauci and the NIH director intervened, arguing that the clinical data are not yet strong enough to justify the approval.
Trump seems to favor Oracle's bid to acquire TikTok's US operations. Oracle boss Larry Ellison is a Trump supporter and donor, and Trump seems to want Oracle, not Microsoft, to acquire ByteDance's US operations. Last week, Trump gave ByteDance 45 days to start a US sale or risk being shut down,.
VIEWS OF THE DAY
So you can just lie to Congress now?
In June 2019, the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote a criminal referral letter to the US Attorney's office in Washington DC for Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr., and Erik Prince (a modern-day private mercenary, extremely wealthy Trump donor and brother to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos). The LA Times broke this story on Friday and NBC News and the Washington Post have since confirmed it.
The letter was bipartisan, signed by Republican then-chair Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia. It raises concerns that these individuals may have misled Congress in their testimony about the investigation into Russia's ties to the Trump campaign.
The committee said it had questions about issues with testimony from Donald Trump Jr., Hope Hicks, and Jared Kushner because it contradicted things said by Robert Gates, a former associate of now-jailed Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Those may or may not have been outright lies.
Prince, Bannon, and Sam Clovis (a lesser known Bannon associate also involved in this Russia mishegoss) get a more severe treatment from the committee's letter. Those men are suspected of making false statements outright. According to the LA Times, they may have lied about a meeting they planned in Seychelles along with Rick Gerson, a hedge fund manager; and Kirill Dmitriev, the head of a Russian sovereign fund. Congress suspects they were attempting to establish a back channel to communicate with the Russian government.
It's unclear what happened once this letter got to the US Attorney's office. Sometimes letters like this get shrugged off because they seem like partisan witch hunts (but this one was signed by both parties) or because they don't actually detail a crime (lying to Congress is undoubtedly a crime). So where's the action? The American people need to see it.
The Trump administration has been a test of this country's faith in the rule of law from the beginning. Trump promised to drain the swamp, but there are few things swampier than getting to lie to Congress just because you're the president's donor or campaign manager. I guess — to borrow a turn of phrase from the man himself — if you're the President's son "they let you do it." — Linette Lopez
DNC Night 2 was a much better show, even if somewhat misleading
I'm not saying the Democratic National Convention's producers might have read my column yesterday, I'm just saying they took my advice.
Out were the squirm-inducing minute-long interviews with "just regular folks," in were more speeches and more face time with luminaries of the party's past and present.
The most effective bit of programming was unquestionably the roll call.
Once an interminable episode of mostly anonymous delegates holding pole-shaped placards bearing their state's name on the cramped floor of a basketball arena, the coronavirus created an opportunity for each state (and territory) to have its moment in the spotlight.
Roll call kicked off with Alabama's Rep. Terri Sewell placing her delegation's vote for Biden with Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge — the site of the civil rights march led by Martin Luther King in 1965 — in the background. Instant stars were created by Rhode Island's calamari-touting delegate and the Louisiana kid holding up a poster of Joe Biden's aviator sunglasses. Matthew Shepherd's parents representing the Wyoming delegation and Khizr Khan representing Virginia were also strikingly powerful moments.
The parade of Disaffected Republicans for Biden also continued last night, with ringing endorsements (and denunciations of Trump) from Chuck Hagel, Colin Powell, and Cindy McCain. Like Night One, a lot of this was directed toward a part of the electorate that doesn't like Trump, but is not all that enthused about a future Democratic Party represented by young socialists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
AOC might have only gotten 90 seconds to speak, where she seconded the nomination of Bernie Sanders to lead into the roll call vote, but she and her cohort will have far more influence on a potential Biden administration than the mostly-retired Republicans who vouched for their pal, Joe. — Anthony Fisher
The Democratic roll call was the most inspiring moment of the entire campaign.
Fisher, I don't think you're appreciating the roll call enough. It was absolutely magnificent, the most inspiring thing on television this entire campaign!
It was the road trip we all dream of making in pandemic, a Magic School Bus tour of the whole nation, its landscapes, its history, its present, and its people.
We began on the Edmund Pettus Bridge celebrating John Lewis, saw the shores of the Pacific with a deliriously excited Rep. Barbara Lee, commemorated the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment with a young college student in the Tennessee hotel where its passage was announced, shared the sorrow and determination of Matthew Shepherd's parents in Casper, Wyoming, reveled in the Fight Club vibe of the Ohio union organizer Josh Abernathy, basked in the sunshine of the US Virgin Islands, visited New Mexico's Pueblo Sandia with tribe member Derrick Lente, and reveled in the unapologetic calamari-hawking of the Rhode Islanders,
We learned about the issues that are preoccupying Americans in different parts of the country, from the Colorado family, New York nurse, and Nebraska meatpacker struggling with COVID, to the Iowans recovering from one of the worst storms in state history, to the Florida father hoping to stop the gun violence that took his child's life at Parkland, to the Gold Star father mourning the racist violence that besieged his city of Charlottesville, to the Utah mayor affirming her state's excellent experience with vote-by-mail.
This roll call was not merely a mild improvement on the shouty convention-hall roll calls of the past. It is a genuinely brilliant new tradition that must — and will — become the standard.
At a time when we're atomized, narrowly restricted to our homes, limited in our social interactions, it showed us America at its most expansive and wonderful, our variety of landscapes and skies, the multiplicity of issues that concern us, the depth of our history (the 19th amendment, the Tulsa race massacre, and the Civil Rights movement, were just a few of the capsule reminders).
And most of all it showed us the variety of us. Young and old, immigrant and native-born, indigenous, Black, white, Hispanic, island people and mountain people and plains people.
It was a Walt Whitman poem come to life. We are large. We contain multitudes. —DP
Another fringe candidate won a GOP primary, and Trump congratulated her
Laura Loomer — a 27-year-old Islamophobic internet personality who's been banned from all the major social media platforms, as well as from Uber, Lyft, GoFundMe, and Venmo — just won the GOP primary in Florida's 21st congressional district.
Loomer is well-known in alt-right and ultra-nationalist internet cauldrons, but she's never been able to achieve the mainstream attention she so desperately seeks. She's essentially a B-list Milo Yiannopoulous.
She tried, and failed, to get arrested at Twitter headquarters when she handcuffed herself to the front door after being banned. She trespassed on Nancy Pelosi's property as an act of protest, again failing to get arrested. She did manage to get arrested in 2017 when she disrupted a Shakespeare in the Park production of "Julius Caesar," using the same shutdown-of-speech tactics she claims to oppose when acted out by the progressive left.
Loomer is such an obnoxious exhibitionist that she was banned in 2019 by the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — about as Trump-friendly a venue as you're likely to find — for harassing reporters.
Unlike the QAnon-supporting Marjorie Greene, Loomer has almost no chance of winning the heavily-Democratic district (which happens to include Mar-a-Lago, making President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump constituents). The GOP primary was a rogue's gallery of fringe candidates with no support from the national party.
But Trump congratulated Loomer on her primary win, anyway. Despite being an inconsequential candidate, Loomer represents a significant and vocal portion of the Trump base, and he dares not to offend them this close to election day. — AF
BUSINESS & ECONOMY
MyPillow CEO has a stake in the company that developed the COVID "cure" Oleandrin. Trump ally Mike Lindell has been pushing to get FDA approval for the unproven remedy, and now the president says the feds will "take a look at it."
Apple becomes the first US-listed company to hit a $2 trillion market cap. Aramco, the Saudi oil giant, briefly hit $2 trillion in December.
LIFE
The USDA shut down the "Tiger King" zoo in Oklahoma. Federal officials suspended the animal exhibition license of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park because of animal welfare violations.
A gentle chocolate snow fell on a Swiss town. A ventilation malfunction at the local Lindt factory released a cocoa cloud that dusted houses nearby.
THE BIG 3*
Roy Jones Jr. is threatening to withdraw from Mike Tyson fight. Jones is annoyed that promoters pushed back the fight from September to November to increase the audience, and wants compensation for the two-month delay.
Everyone infected with coronavirus develops immunity according to a new study. The study finds that even people with mild or asymptomatic COVID cases develop immunity thanks to virus-fighting T-cells
"I'm a big fan of yours." Trump's fawning letters to Putin were included in the Senate Intelligence Committee report showing the connections between his campaign and the Russians.
*The most popular stories on Insider today.
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