Government & Politics

• Biden admits he was pushed out of presidential race, name-drops Pelosi in first interview since exit (NY Post) | Pelosi questions whether Biden wrote letter saying he’d stay in 2024 race (NY Post)

• Copycat Kamala: The soon-to-be formal presidential nominee of the Democrat Party was in the service-heavy swing state of Nevada on Saturday, trying to wrestle back a state that this cycle is trending toward Donald Trump. And no doubt having been told about the popularity of her opponent’s idea for removing taxes from tips, she trotted out the idea as her own. Said Harris: “When I am president, we will … eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.” Not surprisingly, the crowd roared its approval of Harris’s plagiarism. On the bright side, however, this idea now seems to have bipartisan support.

• Kamala Harris seized damning undercover Planned Parenthood videos eight years ago, and they’re finally unsealed (The Federalist)

• Tim Walz’s woke church: Before we note the phoniness of Democrat VP candidate Tim Walz’s religiosity, we should stipulate that the religion of the Left is the state, and for an obvious reason — its hold on power becomes increasingly tenuous when the people’s faith is invested elsewhere. As The Daily Signal reports, Walz periodically “attends Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota,” which is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which is itself “a liberal offshoot of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.” According to its website, Pilgrim is a “reconciling” church, “which includes a partnership with Reconciling Works, a ministry devoted to welcoming, celebrating, and advocating for the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ individuals in Lutheran faith communities.” In addition, the church believes in racial equity as it works “to overcome white supremacy.” And, of course, the church is also mindful of its pronouns, ensuring that everyone on its Staff page is properly identified.

• JD Vance calls out CNN for ignoring own guest, covering for Tim Walz on Iraq deployment (Daily Caller)

• Biden’s medical emergency: Back on July 17, Joe Biden was in Las Vegas, where he was scheduled to speak at a Unidos event when plans suddenly changed. The White House claimed that Biden had come down with a case of COVID and needed to get home to rest and recover. No big deal. However, recently released police audio recordings surrounding the events of Biden’s sudden change of plans indicate that his medical situation appears to have been a bigger emergency than publicly claimed. For example, the LVMPD scrambled to shut down the route to Valley Hospital for the “package,” a reference to Biden. At one point, an officer states, “For everyone on the radio right now, POTUS is 421 [code for an injured or sick person]. He’s being seen, so we’re just kinda waiting to see how this is shaping out. So, for everybody’s knowledge, he’s 421 right now. We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on, and we’re gonna go from there.” It’s not clear who Biden was being seen by, but he never went to the Las Vegas hospital; instead, he was taken to the airport. Was Biden in worse shape than initially reported? Was this the incident that prompted Democrat leadership to finally act to force Biden to drop out of the race?

• Smartmatic execs charged with orchestrating $1 million bribery and money laundering scheme (Daily Mail)

Government

• Another federally funded green company bites the dust: It’s funny how the federal government’s efforts to pick winners and losers by meddling in the “free” market often blows up in its face. Such was the case again recently as debt-ridden SunPower filed for bankruptcy. As Bloomberg reports, “Over the course of less than two years, the once-darling of the [solar] industry was forced to fire workers to cut costs, restate earnings and default on a credit agreement. In 2024, the firm replaced its chief executive officer, restructured its operations and lost its accountant.” What happened? “Didn’t President Biden promise his Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) would create millions of green jobs?” the Wall Street Journal editorial board rhetorically asks. SunPower thus follows Titan Solar Power and Sunworks into failure this year alone. And yet the Biden-Harris regime’s war on fossil fuels continues apace.

• Government debt a bigger threat than climate change: The bigger threat facing the U.S. economy is the expanding federal debt, not climate change, the Congressional Budget Office warned on Friday. According to the CBO, the growing federal debt will shrink the U.S. economy by 3.2% over the next 30 years. In contrast, the forecasted impact of climate change will negatively impact the economy by an estimated 1%. With the federal debt hitting $35 trillion last month, the problem can’t be ignored for much longer. As CBO noted, “The trajectory of deficits and debt under current law is unsustainable. Although there is no identifiable tipping point at which a fiscal crisis would be inevitable, the large and growing amount of debt increases the risk of such a crisis.” The real existential crisis America is facing is not, nor has it ever been, climate change. Rather, it is Washington’s out-of-control spending.

• Court calls NLRB unconstitutional: A ruling last month by a U.S. District Court in Texas seemingly went under the radar, but it has massive implications regarding Washington’s entrenched bureaucratic state. In the case of Space Exploration Technology Corporation v. NLRB, the court agreed with SpaceX’s argument that the National Labor Relations Board was unconstitutional, therefore bringing into question the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act itself. Congress set up the NLRB to “eliminate the President’s ability to remove principal officers,” which the court noted was in violation of Article II of the Constitution, which gives the president full power over the executive branch. The court added, “There is no appropriate way to sever any of the removal protections to remedy the constitutional problems with the NLRB’s structure.” This case will likely head to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and then likely the U.S. Supreme Court. If SCOTUS were to agree with the district court’s ruling, it would force Congress to amend the law or leave private sector labor regulations to each individual state.

• Federal judge orders CDC to stop “likely unlawful” erasure of former employees’ emails (RedState)

Security

• U.S. accelerates deployment of aircraft carrier strike group to Middle East amid imminent threat from Iran, Hezbollah (Daily Wire)

• Trump campaign hacked: The Trump campaign’s emails have been hacked, but this time it isn’t “the Russians.” Instead, the Trump campaign suspects Iranian actors are responsible for the theft and distribution of “sensitive internal documents.” As the AP reports, the Trump campaign “cited an instance of an Iranian military intelligence unit in June sending ‘a spear-phishing email to a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign from a compromised email account of a former senior advisor,’” and Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung blamed the theft on “foreign sources hostile to the United States.” Perhaps the Democrats sense that they’re next. As The Washington Post adds, “So far, two Democratic House members who have served on intelligence and security committees have called for briefings and for declassification of information related to the possible foreign interference in the election.”

• Ukraine/Russia war update: On Saturday, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly acknowledged that Ukraine had pushed “the war out into the aggressor’s territory.” A week ago, Ukrainian forces launched a strike into Russia in the Kursk border region, which apparently caught Russian military leadership flat-footed. This represents the biggest Ukrainian counteroffensive into Russia to date. One Ukrainian official stated, “We are on the offensive. The aim is to stretch the positions of the enemy, to inflict maximum losses and to destabilize the situation in Russia as they are unable to protect their own border.” At the very least, it will force Russia to pull some of its forces from the Ukrainian eastern front to counter this attack.

• U.S. to lift ban on offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia (Reuters)

• Brian Terry’s killer has conviction vacated by appeals court (RedState)

• Drug cartels flying drones with explosives near U.S. border (Daily Wire)

• Abbott orders hospitals to collect data on illegal immigrants’ status (Townhall)

Culture

• A cop gets his head bashed in at a “mostly peaceful” protest marking 10 years since Michael Brown died (PJ Media) | Ferguson police chief lets loose after officer assaulted by protestors, fighting for his life (RedState)

• Algerian boxer embroiled in sex-identification controversy wins Olympic gold medal (National Review) | Another fighter who failed gender tests wins gold in women’s boxing, bloodies opponent (Daily Wire)

World

• UK rolls our totalitarian social media policy that carries prison time for problematic posts (Townhall) | UK police commissioner threatens to extradite and jail U.S. citizens over social media posts (Fox News)

• IDF rejects Hamas claim of over 90 dead after strike on terror operatives at Gaza school (Times of Israel)

• U.S. reportedly offers amnesty to Venezuela’s Maduro to give up power (Semafor)

• Plane crash in Brazil’s São Paulo state kills all 62 on board (BBC)

Misc.

• City of Uvalde releases records from 2022 Robb Elementary shooting (ABC News)

• Team USA won 126 medals at the Paris Olympics (NY Post)

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