Politics

• Harris taps Walz: This morning, Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Most political insiders thought the relatively moderate, pro-Israel governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, would take the prize, but placating the anti-Semitic base of the Democrat Party was apparently more of a concern than Walz’s record of social injustice in his state. Our Douglas Andrews has more in today’s profile of Walz, including his performance during the 2020 George Floyd riots.

• Satire: Democrats worried choosing Jewish vice president may cost them the all-important “Death to America” vote (Babylon Bee)

• Harris secures Dem nomination with middle-of-the-night vote after skipping primary process (Fox News)

• Primaries to watch in Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, and Washington (Roll Call) | “Squad” Dems to rally for Cori Bush as she fights for her political life (Fox News)

• Harris’s basement campaign dwarfs Biden’s: At least Joe Biden had the COVID pandemic as his cover for avoiding press interviews and conferences during his infamous basement campaign in 2020. Kamala Harris has no such excuse to hide behind, and yet she has avoided the press like the plague. Since she was announced as the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, Harris has held exactly zero press conferences. At this point in his 2020 campaign, Biden had done two press interviews. It’s clear that if she can get away with it, Harris will avoid facing the press. And that’s because she is terrible off script. While she is infamous for her mind-numbing word-salad answers, what may be the bigger issue is Harris being forced to respond to questions regarding policy or even her history of radical leftist views. Even more glaring is the fact that Donald Trump has done at least five press interviews, including with hostile reporters, since Harris was coronated.

• Trump re-alienates a state he needs: Donald Trump still hasn’t gotten over his grudge after losing Georgia in 2020, which he blames on the Peach State’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, for his refusal to go along with Trump’s election fraud claims. Furthermore, Trump’s comments served to throw the two Senate races to the Democrats, which effectively handed them control of the Senate. Then, during the 2022 gubernatorial primary, Trump pushed to unseat Kemp via former Senator David Purdue. Thankfully, that effort failed, and Kemp went on to again defeat Democrat Stacey Abrams soundly. Yet, despite the bad blood, Kemp has endorsed Trump for president. But Trump threw Kemp under the bus yet again at a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, saying, “He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy, and he’s a very average governor.” Trump added, “[If it] wasn’t for me, he would not be your governor. I think everybody knows that.” Really? As noted above, Trump did try to get Kemp removed and failed. Trump didn’t help Kemp get elected; Kemp got Kemp elected. The fact is that Trump, for whatever reason, doesn’t understand Georgia. His attacking the state’s Republican leadership only serves to undermine his unity message, making it harder for Trump to gain victory in a must-win swing state.

• Supreme Court spurns bid to block Trump sentencing and gag order in hush-money case (Daily Wire)

• Jamie Raskin: We’ll disqualify Trump: If Donald Trump wins the election on November 5 but Democrats manage to retake the House, things may get mighty interesting between that date and the presidential inauguration date of January 20. It’s admittedly an unlikely two-part scenario, but Maryland congressman, former law professor, and lead Trump impeachment manager Jamie Raskin said publicly in February that if Trump does indeed win the election, Congress must “disqualify” him. So it appears that Raskin is a true-believer, a dead-ender who thinks the 14th Amendment, Section 3 was meant to prevent The Insurrectionist Trump from being president, rather than preventing ex-Confederates from holding federal office after the Civil War.

• “We have to stay woke”: The clip is viral, it’s cringeworthy, and the ads write themselves. There she is, Kamala Harris, chatting with philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, during the annual Recode conference in 2017. And she says: “We have to stay woke. Like, everybody needs to be woke. And you can talk about if you’re the wokest or woker, but just stay more woke than less woke.” This is the real Kamala Harris, the hard-left Bay Area progressive and the daughter of the Marxist college professor. No wonder she’s been dodging that sit-down interview with the mainstream media ever since she accepted Joe Biden’s nomination for president. As Fox News reports, “The conference focused on issues such as immigration and the environment, including Harris speaking out against the Trump administration’s drug policies and immigration polices just moments ahead of her call on Americans to be ‘woke.’” We’re not sure how the word “woke” is polling these days, but we suspect it isn’t good. And we look forward to Harris having to explain herself, if she ever sits for an honest interview or gets challenged at a debate.

Big Tech

• Google trust-busted: On Monday, Federal District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by engaging in deals with the likes of Apple, Samsung, and AT&T that made its search engine the default option on most smartphones. Mehta said that these deals “are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects. Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” This ruling represents the first time in over 20 years that the Justice Department has won an antitrust case against Google. The Big Tech giant promised to appeal the decision. Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, argued, “This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available.” Meanwhile, an attorney for Google admitted to the House Judiciary Committee that its autocomplete function did indeed fail to populate “Trump” when searches for “assassination attempt” were typed in. Google claimed this error was due to built-in protections against political violence, which were “out of date.”

Regulatory Commissars

• $1.2 trillion worth of regs in eight months: Under Donald Trump, the nation enjoyed financial savings thanks to tax cuts as well as cuts to burdensome government regulations. Concerning the latter, Americans’ regulatory burden decreased by some $100 billion. This was a welcomed reversal of the Obama era, during which the country was saddled with over $308 billion in new regulatory costs. Unfortunately, under Joe Biden, the regulatory state returned with a vengeance. His administration has added nearly $1.7 trillion in new regulatory compliance costs, with $1.2 trillion of that total being added in the last eight months. Biden has added more in regulatory compliance costs than any president before him.

Security

• Israel takes out commander of elite Hezbollah unit in drone strike (NY Post)

• UNRWA spent months denying it works with Hamas. Then it fired nine staffers for participating in the October 7 massacre. (Washington Free Beacon)

• Several U.S. personnel injured in Iranian-backed terror attack on base in Iraq (Daily Wire)

• Cheatle wanted White House cocaine destroyed: Anyone who wondered whether former Pepsi security chief and Secret Service director Kim Cheatle was an unfair fall gal for the agency’s catastrophic failure to protect Donald Trump on July 13 should wonder no more. We knew she was incompetent, as evidenced by her “sloped roof” comment, but now we know she’s also deeply partisan. Remember the cocaine that was discovered in the White House last summer? As RealClearPolitics reports, Cheatle and others wanted to destroy it, “but the Secret Service Forensics Services Division and the Uniformed Division stood firm and rejected the push to dispose of the evidence, according to three sources in the Secret Service community.” Why might Cheatle want to destroy it? Perhaps she knew the truth. RCP continues: “At least one Uniformed Division officer was initially assigned to investigate the cocaine incident. But after he told his supervisors, including Cheatle … that he wanted to follow a certain crime-scene investigative protocol, he was taken off the case.” Sounds like a cover-up to us.

• 100 illegals on terror watchlist let loose in U.S.: Kamala Harris is enjoying an extended honeymoon, but it can’t last forever. She’ll eventually have to account for her flip-flopping. And, more important, she’ll have to account for her abject failure as our nation’s border czar. According to a new House Judiciary report, “Under the Biden-Harris Administration, of the more than 250 illegal aliens on the terrorist watchlist who were encountered by Border Patrol at the southwest border between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, DHS has released into American communities at least 99, with at least 34 others in DHS custody but not yet removed from the United States.” Beyond those potential terrorists, there are plenty of other potential national security risks: 2,134 Afghan nationals, 33,347 Chinese nationals, 541 Iranian nationals, 520 Syrian nationals, and 3,104 Uzbek nationals among them. The media’s whitewash continues, but these facts are stubborn things.

Economy

• The Dow Jones slumps over 1,000 points as fears about the U.S. economy intensify (NPR) | Satire: Kamala desperately Googles “What is a stock market crash” (Babylon Bee)

• Electric vehicle owners getting hit with negative equity as depreciation crushes used EV values (Just the News)

• Policy: Housing market slowdown signals broader economic troubles (Heartland Institute)

Misc.

• Ashli Babbitt $30 million wrongful death suit hearing set for August 6 (RedState)

• LA County has decided it won’t comply with Newsom’s homeless order (Hot Air)

• Michael Phelps calls for lifetime doping bans after Chinese swimming controversy (NY Post)

• Bangladeshi PM resigns as widening unrest sees protesters storm her official residence (AP)

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