Obamas Headline DNC Night Two

Happy Wednesday! We’ve written enough stories about artificial intelligence (AI) to know it’s an imperfect technology trained on imperfect human inputs. And apparently, one of those inputs is good, old-fashioned Rickrolling: One customer service bot helpfully provided a user with a link to a video tutorial that did not, in fact, exist. You can see where this is going.  

On a totally unrelated note, click here. For … reasons. 

Quick Hits Today’s Top Stories

• During the second night of the Democratic National Convention, Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, delivered a personal speech about his wife, followed by former First Lady Michelle Obama and former President Barack Obama, who painted Harris as the inheritor of his legacy. At one point, the former president encouraged the crowd in a chant of “Yes she can!”—a play on his 2008 slogan, “Yes we can!” But many speakers—including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and several current or former Republicans—emphasized the tight margins in the polls. Meanwhile, police arrested dozens of anti-Israel protesters in front of the Israeli consulate in Chicago on Tuesday night after many of them charged at a line of police.
• A federal judge in Texas on Tuesday upheld a challenge to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) ban on non-compete agreements set to go into effect next month, holding that the FTC did not have the statutory authority to set such a rule. The FTC first passed the rule along partisan lines in April, but it immediately faced a legal challenge. A spokeswoman for the FTC said the agency is “seriously considering a potential appeal” of the decision.
• The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced on Tuesday that it has recovered the bodies of six male hostages held in Gaza—five of whom had previously been reported as deceased—found in Hamas-operated tunnels in the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis. The six hostages, all of whom were kidnapped by Hamas militants during its October 7 terrorist attacks, ranged from 35 to 80 years old.
• The IDF also struck a Hamas command and control center on Tuesday that it said was hidden within a school compound in Gaza City, while Hamas government officials said the air strike killed 12 Palestinians. “Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians,” the IDF tweeted. “The Hamas terrorist organization systematically violates international law and operates from within civilian infrastructure and shelters in Gaza, exploiting the Gazan civilian population for its terrorist activities.”
• Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with officials in Egypt and Qatar on Tuesday to push for a ceasefire and hostage release proposal accepted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the day prior. Hamas leaders, who have rejected the latest deal, on Tuesday accused the U.S. of “blind bias” towards Israel.
• The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday agreed to make itself liable if a district court judge ruled against former President Donald Trump in a pending lawsuit centered around his removal of protesters at Lafayette Square in June 2020. In a four-page legal notice, DOJ officials explained that the DOJ would become the defendant in the case since Trump cannot be held personally accountable because he was “acting within the scope” of his executive authority as president. Three protesters initially filed the lawsuit 10 days after the Lafayette Square incident and argued that their removal infringed upon several rights, including those protected by the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments.
• Lawyers representing the former Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey—who officially resigned from the U.S. Senate on Tuesday following his conviction last month on 16 felony charges, including bribery—requested on Monday that a federal judge vacate Menendez’s conviction and schedule a new trial on the grounds that he was acting within the confines of the “speech and debate” clause of the Constitution which grants senators certain immunity from prosecution. “These convictions will make terrible, dangerous law,” Menendez’s legal representative wrote in the 52-page request. “All of Senator Menendez’s convictions must be reversed.” Meanwhile, Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is expected later this week to appoint his former chief of staff, George Helmy, to fill Menendez’s seat until the term expires in January when a newly elected senator will take office.
• A federal judge on Tuesday rejected Hunter Biden’s bid to have his felony tax evasion charges dismissed. Biden’s legal team argued that the special counsel prosecuting the case had been improperly appointed, mirroring the legal reasoning successfully deployed by lawyers representing former President Donald Trump in his classified documents case. That ruling by Judge Aileen Cannon is now being appealed by special counsel Jack Smith. Biden’s team also cited Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in a recent ruling on presidential immunity, which questioned the constitutionality of special counsels. The judge overseeing Biden’s case, U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi, wrote in his decision that neither “Justice Thomas’s opinion nor Judge Cannon’s order is binding precedent” and therefore had no bearing on the case.
• The Treasury Department on Tuesday imposed sanctions on former Haitian President Michel Martelly—who held the office from 2011 to 2016—for allegedly using his authority to help traffic illegal drugs and sponsor violent gangs. Martelly is a U.S. resident living in Florida, and it’s unclear how the sanctions will affect him. 

Turn Down For What? 

CHICAGO—The final speaker for Tuesday night’s program at the Democratic National Convention may have been a popular, two-term former president, but even he recognized he was playing second fiddle.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling fired up. I am feeling ready to go,” said former President Barack Obama shortly after taking the stage at the United Center. “Even if I’m the only person stupid enough to speak right after Michelle Obama.”

The former first lady’s act was indeed a difficult one to follow. Michelle Obama brought the house down in her hometown of Chicago, bringing the energy in the arena to a crescendo that not even her husband—who has been delivering barnburner speeches at DNCs for the past twenty years—could match.

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Worth Your Time

• Why do left-wingers give anti-Zionist protesters a pass, despite some of the groups’ professed genocidal beliefs? Liberal Jonathan Chait took on his own side in New York Magazine. “What Democrats and progressives need to decide is whether to treat these groups as noble idealists broadly on the right side of history or as the fanatic adherents of an illiberal and unjust program,” he wrote. “In the Middle East, that program calls for endless war until the Jews have been expurgated from a soil on which they unnaturally reside. In the West, it means imposing social norms that make most Jews feel alien and unwelcome. To advance justice for Palestinians and Jews does not require placating, forming alliances with, or ceding ‘leverage’ to followers of this hateful program. The morally just response is to meet this ideology the way liberals meet other forms of hate: by calling it what it is.”
• One day, 17-year-old Kevin Lik was attending class and collecting plants for his herbarium. The next, he was imprisoned in a Russian penal colony. “The teenager—with dual Russian and German citizenship—was arrested last year while still at school and became the youngest person in modern Russian history to have been convicted of treason,” Sergei Goryashko reported for the BBC. In August, Kevin was freed as part of a sprawling prisoner exchange. “In Germany, after a hospital check-up, Kevin was finally able to greet his mother, who had got a visa to fly in from Russia. ‘She cried. I told her everything was fine, not to worry, that I loved her very much.’ Mother and son are now living in Germany and Kevin is full of enthusiasm to finish school. ‘I don’t have a desire for revenge, but I do have a very strong desire to participate in opposition activities,’ he tells me. Kevin still has his prison uniform, stuffed in a bag in the corner of his room. When I ask what he wanted most of all while he was forced to wear it, he simply replies: ‘To hug Mum of course.’”

Presented Without Comment

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, on the ticket’s future: 

There’s two options that we’re looking at, and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Walz presidency because we draw votes from Trump—or we draw somehow more votes from Trump. Or we walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump and, you know, we walk away from that and we explain to our base why we’re making this decision.

Also Presented Without Comment

Politico: Democrats Blame ‘Raucous Applause’ for Massive Delays to Convention Programming 

Asked for comment, the convention officials said in a statement: “Because of the raucous applause interrupting speaker after speaker, we ultimately skipped elements of our program to ensure we could get to President Biden as quickly as possible so that he could speak directly to the American people. We are proud of the electric atmosphere in our convention hall and proud that our convention is showcasing the broad and diverse coalition behind the Harris-Walz ticket throughout the week on and off the stage.”

In the Zeitgeist

Michael Keaton takes over household duties from his wife in Goodrich, a very original, never-been-done-by-Michael-Keaton film. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew filed their first dispatch from the DNC, and Nick expressed hope that the era of messianic politics might be coming to an end.
• On the podcasts: Jonah is joined on The Remnant by Mike Pesca of The Gist to discuss antisemitism, Tim Walz, and Kamala Harris’ media strategy (or lack thereof).
• On the site: Kevin weighs in on Donald Trump’s recent comments taking aim at the Federal Reserve’s independence, Charles reports on a “Democrats for Life” event at the DNC, and Jonah pans Kamala Harris’ plan to combat “price-gouging.”