Morning Briefing: Harris's VP Pick, the RFK, Jr. Bear Cub Story, and the Stock Market

Plus, bad headline writing

Madam Vice President Harris is expected to name her running sometime before she kicks off a tour across the swing states beginning in Philly tomorrow. Tim Walz is still our pick (and Nancy Pelosi’s), but Josh Shapiro is the frontrunner. Mark Kelly’s social media, meanwhile, has been sending mixed messages. We’ve done enough speculating. We’ll just wait for the pick now. I will say, however, that it’s impressive that — as of the time this is being published, anyway — the pick hasn’t leaked. I think it shows what an impressive ship she’s running over there.

— In case you missed it, Jimmy Carter — who has been in hospice for months and is about to turn 100 — says that he’s trying to hang on so he can vote for Kamala Harris. Talk about closing the enthusiasm gap! You KNOW he’s excited to see Rosalyn in the afterlife, but he wants to stick it out and register his vote in what could be a pivotal swing state in Georgia. That’s patriotism!

— That vote may be even more important now that it appears that Trump is blowing what small lead he had in Georgia by shit-talking the Republican governor and Secretary of State, who are well liked by most Georgian Republicans. He can’t help but shoot himself in the foot.

— The big story this morning is another example that we are in the weirdest timeline. RFK, Jr., getting ahead of a New Yorker story, confessed in a video, featuring Roseanne Barr hanging out in his kitchen that he picked up a roadkill bearcub, stuffed it into his trunk, and — after a steak dinner with friends — decided to dump the cub in Central Park and stage it as though a bicycle had hit it. It generated a ton of headlines, both local and national, and only now is it being revealed that it was RFJ, Jr. Interestingly, the daughter of his cousin, Carolyn Kennedy, reported the story in the NYTimes in 2014. For the record: RFK, Jr. was not a dumb kid doing a dumb kid thing. He did a lot of dumb kid things when he was young. This was when he was 60.

If you haven’t watched yet, here’s the video.

— I don’t know what to think of the NYTimes. It’s read almost entirely by people from the center to the left. And the thing is, if it ran objectively objective pieces, I’d be fine with that — and the reality is, most of their reporting is great. But their headlines, which are not written by the reporters but by someone trying to generate clicks, are enraging. To wit: On Friday night, Donald Trump unilaterally proposed a debate with Kamala Harris on Fox News with a Trump-friendly audience after having rejected the debate he originally agreed to with Joe Biden on ABC. It was bullshit, of course, and the piece itself said as much, but the original headline read: “Trump Agrees to Fox News Debate on Sept. 4th.”

What? That is terrible framing. But Trump supporters do not see that headline because they don’t read the NYTimes. So why phrase it that way except to gin up the blood pressure of their readers? It must be working—it’s really the only national newspaper that layoffs haven’t beset—but it’s obnoxious.

Hilariously, Trump supporters really want him to debate Harris because they think he’ll wipe the floor with her. Trump knows more about his ability to debate Kamala Harris than they do.

Speaking of bad headlines, the Boston Globe has apologized and retracted this headline in the print edition, but I cannot believe they let this run. Everyone who had spent 30 seconds on the Internet knew this wasn’t the case. How do you let this go? Again — this was a headline problem, not an article problem (the article was written by AP — the Globe attached its own headline). Headline writing is as challenging, often, as writing the pieces themselves, but these headline writers need to figure their shit out.

— JD Vance and the Trump campaign, probably tired of taking flak for Vance’s “childless cat lady” comments, sent Usha Vance out to take fire. She asked folks to stop focusing so much on the “quip and instead on the substance of the message. “What he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be a parent in this country, and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder.”

Interestingly, that’s not what JD Vance has said because he’s basically doubled down every time he’s been allowed to clean it up.

“JD, absolutely at the time and today, would never, ever, ever want to say something to hurt someone who was trying to have a family, who really was struggling with that,” she added.

He didn’t want to hurt anyone? Has Usha seen this quote from her husband:
“You know, I worry that it makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less, less mentally stable. And of course, you talk about going on Twitter –- final point I’ll make is you go on Twitter and almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are people who don’t have kids at home.”

— I hate that we could see yet another wrinkle in the election as we enter the final 92 days, but the stock market is falling precipitously today amid fears of a recession. The good news is that there may finally be plans to cut interest rates. The bad news is, the economy has been resilient as hell through the Biden Admin. I’d hate to see it fall apart in the final months. It would increase the degree of difficulty for Harris. Worse still is that Democrats know how to manage downturns. Trump would exacerbate it. Let’s hope this is a correction. The declines are already plateauing, and some of the declines can actually be attributed to the big bets tech made into AI — they may have (badly) overestimated the demand. The stock market, meanwhile, is still 10,000 points higher than when Trump left office.