August 07 2024

Olympics Update
1 VP Harris Selects Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Running Mate
2 Explosion of U.S. Laws Causes Paperwork Tsunami
3 Pro-Israel Groups Help Unseat Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri Primary
4 EPA Issues Emergency Ban on Weedkiller Linked to Health Risks
5 OPINION Stoller: Will Kamala Harris Continue Biden’s Fight Against Corporate Power?
8/7/1984 Japan defeats the United States to win the Olympic Gold in baseball in Los Angeles 

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Olympics Update

Team USA’s Gabby Thomas won the women’s 200 meters and Cole Hocker notched a stunning victory in the men’s 1,500 meters. Elsewhere, the United States edged Germany in the women’s soccer semifinals and Cuban wrestler Mijaín López became the first Olympian to win five consecutive gold medals in the same individual event.

Article Source: WaPo

1 VP Harris Selects Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as Running Mate

Harris finalizes the Democratic ticket with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, facing off against Trump and Vance in November.

Vice President Harris on Tuesday announced that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) will be her running mate in the 2024 election, at long last solidifying the two major-party presidential tickets with just three months to go. Harris chose Walz over contenders such as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) in an abbreviated process, following President Biden’s decision two weeks ago to drop out of his reelection race. The election will now pit the Harris-Walz ticket against the Republican ticket of former president Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), along with a smattering of independent candidates that includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
WaPo

Republicans’ insta-reaction yesterday to VP KAMALA HARRIS’ choice of Minnesota Gov. TIM WALZ as her running mate was immediate and genuine: They were positively giddy about not having to take on Pennsylvania Gov. JOSH SHAPIRO, the popular leader of the most important state on the electoral map. “She went with the left-wing pick,” one GOP operative told us, calling it the outcome Republicans were “quietly rooting for.” Sen. STEVE DAINES (R-Mont.), charged with electing GOP senators in swing states across the country as NRSC chair, was even more succinct: “Thanks Kamala.” It is, in other words, the reset opportunity that Republicans were looking for. But the GOP glee obscures a big open question that will determine whether the party can capitalize on Harris’ perceived misstep
POLITICO

Article Source: WaPo, POLITICO

2 Explosion of U.S. Laws Causes Paperwork Tsunami

Federal statutes have ballooned to 54 volumes, with Congress passing millions of words of new legislation each year.

Our country has always been a nation of laws, but something has changed dramatically in recent decades. Contrary to the narrative that Congress is racked by an inability to pass bills, the number of laws in our country has simply exploded. Less than 100 years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018, the U.S. Code encompassed 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the past decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to 2 million to 3 million words of new federal law each year. Even the length of bills has grown—from an average of about two pages in the 1950s to 18 today. And that’s just the average. Nowadays, it’s not unusual for new laws to span hundreds of pages. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 ran more than 600 pages, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 almost 1,000 pages, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021—which included a COVID-19 relief package—more than 5,000 pages. About the last one, the chair of the House Rules Committee quipped that “if we provide[d] everyone a paper copy we would have to destroy an entire forest.” Buried in the bill were provisions for horse racing, approvals for two new Smithsonian museums, and a section on foreign policy regarding Tibet. By comparison, the landmark protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took just 28 pages to describe.

Article Source: The Atlantic

3 Pro-Israel Groups Help Unseat Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri Primary

Cori Bush loses to Wesley Bell, with significant financial backing from AIPAC and other pro-Israel entities.

Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, one of the most outspoken progressives in the House, lost her primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, falling to a campaign by powerful pro-Israel political groups intent on ousting a fierce critic of the nation’s war in Gaza. Her opponent, Wesley Bell, a county prosecutor, ran as a progressive and a pragmatist. But he was boosted by more than $8 million in spending from a super PAC affiliated with the country’s largest pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and other similar entities. That outside money transformed the race into one of the most expensive House primaries in history. The contentious contest came just weeks after Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, another outspoken progressive and vocal Israel critic, suffered a stinging primary defeat.

Article Source: NYT

4 EPA Issues Emergency Ban on Weedkiller Linked to Health Risks

The Environmental Protection Agency suspends use of Dacthal, citing severe health risks for unborn babies.

In a move not seen for almost 40 years, the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday issued an emergency order suspending all uses of a weedkiller linked to serious health risks for unborn babies. The herbicide dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, also known as DCPA or Dacthal, is used on crops such as broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage and onions. Fetuses exposed to it could suffer from low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased I.Q., and impaired motor skills later in life, the E.P.A. said.

Article Source: NYT

5 OPINION Stoller: Will Kamala Harris Continue Biden’s Fight Against Corporate Power?

The importance of Harris’s stance on corporate monopolies and competition as she joins the presidential race.

What does Kamala Harris think about corporate power? This is an important question to ask about any presidential candidate, but it’s especially relevant in Ms. Harris’s case. After all, she is a high-ranking member of the Biden administration, which has sought to combat corporate power — in the form of monopolies, unfair competitive practices and price fixing — with a vigor that we hadn’t seen in decades. Over the past three and a half years, the administration has sued four enormous corporations on allegations that they have engaged in unfair competition: Apple, Meta, Amazon and Google. On Monday, in a major victory for the administration, the judge in another Google antitrust case ruled that the company is an illegal monopolist. The administration has sought to stop price-fixing and consolidation in the meat, real estate and supermarket industries, and to eliminate junk fees on credit cards and bank accounts. The chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, is seeking to block private equity financiers from consolidating health care providers. The administration is even suing to break up Ticketmaster’s owner. Behind all these efforts is a vision of commerce: that conducting business means making or doing something useful for a profit, not extracting cash using coercion; that focusing on a high stock price over productivity may lead to disasters like Boeing’s safety crisis; that innovation and entrepreneurship should be prioritized over finance. It’s also a view of how to preserve political freedom: Corporate power must be checked by competition. At the moment we don’t know if Ms. Harris shares this vision. Addressing corporate power was not a big part of what she did as the attorney general of California, as a U.S. senator or as vice president. And as a candidate, while she has mentioned price gouging, medical debt and corporate landlords, she has not laid out a full policy agenda. Some signs, however, are worrisome.

If Ms. Harris does become president, retreating from this agenda would be a serious mistake. During the Clinton and Obama administrations, which were both overly sympathetic to big business, working-class and rural voters left the party in droves, fueling the rise of figures like Mr. Trump. That could happen again. More important would be the cost to our liberties. America needs safe airplanes, reliable medicine and our own semiconductor fabrication plants. That requires prioritizing real businesses over extractive ones, and fair competition over monopolies.

Mr. Stoller is the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonprofit organization that studies monopolies and the author of BIG, an anti-monopoly Substack.

Article Source: NYT

8/7/1984 Japan defeats the United States to win the Olympic Gold in baseball in Los Angeles 

Sources

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2024/08/06/paris-olympics-2024-live-medals-scores-day-11/

2. 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/06/5-takeaways-harriss-pick-tim-walz-her-vp-nominee/; Playbook email

3. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/america-has-too-many-laws-neil-gorsuch/679237/

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/us/politics/cori-bush-wesley-bell-primary.html?smid=url-share

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/climate/epa-dacthal-dimethyl-tetrachloroterephthalate-ban.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

6. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/opinion/kamala-harris-google-antitrust.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb