Happy Monday! Someone should check on the person running social media for the Chicago White Sox, currently tied for the Major League Baseball record for most losses in a single season—with six games left to play. The team’s account has stopped tweeting the scores of its games, opting instead for a lot of words to say, “We lost.”
September 18: “FINAL: the other team scored more runs than us.”
September 20: “FINAL: the number of runs we scored was not greater than the number of runs they scored.”
September 21: “FINAL: can be found on the MLB app.”
Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories
- A rare daytime airstrike on Beirut, Lebanon, on Friday by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed several top commanders of Hezbollah—the Iranian-backed, Lebanon-based terrorist group—as well as more than a dozen terrorist operatives gathered. Lebanese government authorities claimed 37 people in total were killed in the attack, including three children. IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said the Hezbollah militants were sheltering beneath a residential building—accusing them of using Lebanese civilians as “human shields”—and were planning an attack “to infiltrate Israeli communities and kidnap and murder innocent civilians in a similar manner to the October 7 Massacre.” On Monday morning, the IDF conducted a series of airstrikes across Lebanon, hitting more than 300 targets in what it described as a preemptive measure to thwart a large-scale rocket attack by Hezbollah. The Iran-backed group launched more than 100 rockets into northern Israel early Sunday morning, with some hitting near the northern Israeli city of Haifa. The barrages, Hezbollah’s deepest since it began firing on Israel nearly a year ago, injured four people and led to a fatal car accident after air raid sirens caused a teenage driver to panic.
- The IDF also said on Friday it had opened an internal investigation following viral video footage of what appeared to be several IDF soldiers improperly handling bodies—including throwing and dragging them off a rooftop—in the West Bank city of Qabatiya. In a separate statement, the IDF confirmed that its forces killed seven armed terrorists in Qabatiya on Thursday—four killed from gunfire and three killed by an Israeli airstrike—and arrested seven other suspected terrorists.
- Sri Lankan voters on Saturday elected Anura Kumara Dissanayake—a candidate from the Marxist-Leninist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna party—as the country’s next president. The 55-year-old Dissanayake—a member of the Sri Lankan parliament since 2015—led with 42.3 percent of the first-round vote and secured 55.9 percent in the second round of voting. The leftist defeated parliamentary opposition leader Sajith Premadasa and current Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, in addition to dozens of lesser-known candidates. The presidential election is Sri Lanka’s first since protests against the country’s poor economic conditions in 2022 forced its then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign.
- French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday announced cabinet appointments to complete the country’s new government after he had appointed right-of-center former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, a Républicain, as prime minister earlier this month. The new ministers include members of both Macron’s centrist Renaissance Party and the right-of-center Républicain Party. The two parties—which came in second and fourth place, respectively, in France’s July parliamentary elections that saw no party achieve a majority—will seek to form a governing majority in the country’s parliament.
- European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Friday that the European Union had finalized a proposal to loan Ukraine $39 billion to prop up its economy and energy infrastructure, underwritten by windfall profits from frozen Russian assets. G7 nations—which include the U.S. and several EU members—had planned to use Russian assets in Western banks and clearinghouses to provide a $50 loan to Ukraine.
- Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to the United States on Sunday, visiting a munitions factory in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that has produced shells for Ukrainian forces. Zelensky is scheduled to meet with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former President Donald Trump later this week, as well as visit New York City for the United Nations General Assembly meeting.
- A summary of an internal Secret Service investigation released on Friday said that Secret Service personnel assigned to former President Donald Trump suffered from “communication gaps” with local law enforcement and a “lack of due diligence” ahead of the attempted assassination of the GOP presidential candidate at a July 13 campaign rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania. The Secret Service added it is currently reviewing accountability measures in light of the report’s findings. “What has become clear to me is that we need a shift in paradigm in how we conduct our operations,” acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe said in a statement.
- The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Friday sued three of the largest pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs)—CVS, Cigna, and UnitedHealth Group—alleging that they have engaged in illegal anticompetitive practices that have raised the price of insulin. The FTC accused the three companies—which the complaint says administer a combined 80 percent of all U.S. prescriptions—of prioritizing higher-priced products while brokering prescription insulin. The two Republicans on the committee recused themselves from the vote to file suit against the three companies, while the three Democrats voted in favor. The companies named in the suit pushed back on the FTC characterization of their actions, with a UnitedHealth representative saying the “baseless” action “demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how drug pricing works.”
- CNN reported Sunday that Angela Alsobrooks—the executive from Prince George’s County and Democratic Senate candidate from Maryland—claimed a series of tax property deductions for which she did not qualify. The alleged property tax violations include claiming a senior citizen tax break on a property in Washington, D.C., that she did not qualify for—saving her about 50 percent in taxes on the property—while also claiming primary residency in two separate properties in D.C. and Maryland. A senior adviser to Alsobrooks’ senatorial campaign has since said the candidate was unaware of any property tax violations she committed and is working with officials to resolve the issue.
- Kentucky District Judge Kevin Mullins was shot and killed on Thursday by local Sheriff Mickey Stines, who then turned himself in and was charged with first-degree murder. Law enforcement officials said Stines shot Mullins inside the Letcher County Courthouse after a dispute, but it remains unclear what sparked the argument. The pair had reportedly eaten lunch together earlier that same day.
Battle for Congress Heats Up
The last 90 days have been a wild political ride. Stable electoral trends have been mugged by the reality of events, from nominee switches to assassination attempts. But despite the near-daily churn, the presidential race remains incredibly close: The meta trend of negative polarization remains undefeated.
But downballot races are still very much in flux as the Democratic and Republican parties battle for congress majorities. Control of both the House and the Senate will come down to just a handful of contests, and how candidates in those contests run the final leg of their races will determine whether the 47th president—whoever he or she is—has a rubber stamp or a meaningful check on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
In several states, early voting is already underway. In Fairfax County, Virginia, for example—where a Senate seat is up for grabs—the number of ballots cast on the first day of in-person early voting nearly quadrupled the 2020 figure, serving as a reminder that we now have an election season, rather than an election day.
What do the polls say about each party’s chances of winning a majority in either congressional chamber? Like the presidential race, the battle for congressional control …
As a non-paying reader, you are receiving a truncated version of The Morning Dispatch. Our 1,540-word item on the coming congressional races is available in the members-only version of TMD.
Worth Your Time
- In the Times of Israel, our own Charlotte Lawson reports on the elderly Israelis forced to leave their homes in northern Israel. “Irit Efrati, a Kibbutz Dan resident since birth, recalls just one other instance in which she had to flee her northern border community: in 1948, as a seven-year-old during the Israeli War of Independence,” Charlotte wrote. “‘They took all of the kibbutz children and moved them to Haifa,’ the 83-year-old said from a hotel in the same city where, decades later, she once again found herself effectively a refugee in her own country after Hezbollah began firing on northern Israel last year on October 8. … The prolonged period of displacement has taken a particular toll on elderly evacuees, who lean on one another in the absence of the community and familial support systems they enjoyed back home. But for many of the displaced seniors, who have lived through and fought in various wars throughout the young country’s history, the abandonment of the north is more than just disruptive—it’s also profoundly unsettling to their core beliefs about the Israeli state.”
- In a gripping and deeply reported story for New York Times Magazine, Sarah A. Topol tells the story of a career Russian military officer who deserted. “Ivan didn’t spend time thinking about the morality of trying to flee despite sending other people to the front line,” she wrote. “This was the automatic reflex of a well-developed muscle of moral ambiguity. That’s not my area of expertise. I don’t care why the person didn’t show up for the service. The mere fact of not reporting for duty is a violation. I’m just doing my job. … This was never a story about heroes or bravery, a valiant victor or a helpless victim; from the beginning Ivan wanted me to make that clear. It is a story about the dangers of an act of independence after a life of conformity, and about how defection from Putin’s system is a sentence without end.”
Presented Without Comment
NBC News: Vance Says Allegations Against [North Carolina Lt. Gov. and GOP Gubernatorial Candidate] Mark Robinson ‘Aren’t Necessarily Reality’
“I don’t not believe him, I don’t believe him—I just think that you have to let these things sometimes play out in the court of public opinion,” Vance said. “He’s going to make whatever arguments he wants to make. I’m sure the news media and others are going to investigate these comments further.”
Also Presented Without Comment
Axios: Trump Says He Doesn’t See Himself Running In 2028 If He Loses In November
In the Zeitgeist
File this under “words we never thought we’d write”: Check out this new music from Mozart. You read that correctly. German archivists discovered the previously unknown, 260-year-old string trio composition from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in a library in Leipzig. It was performed live for the first time on Thursday in the composer’s birthplace of Salzburg, Austria, and again in Leipzig this weekend:
Toeing the Company Line
- In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics team examined whether scandals plaguing GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson will hurt Trump in North Carolina, Nick offered some (🔒) thoughts on the curious timing of the scandal, Jonah argued that Hezbollah’s past, present, and future aggression against Israel justified the pager attacks, Chris compared the (🔒) swing-state polls of this election cycle to those in the 2020 and 2016 presidential races, and in Dispatch Faith, Matthew Namee explored conflicts within Orthodox Christianity in light of a new Ukrainian law targeting the Russian Orthodox Church.
- On the podcasts: Jonah ruminated on the Hezbollah-pager plot, scolded the media for playing morality police, and marveled at the unbelievable idiocy of Trump’s defenders. And on today’s episode of The Dispatch Podcast, Jamie talks to former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht about Israel’s most recent operation against Hezbollah and how Iran might respond.
- On the site over the weekend: Guy Denton reviewed the movie Reagan, finding it an underwhelming personification of the 40th president.
- On the site today: Ilya Somin dives into the state of the libertarian movement in this week’s Monday Essay, and Charlotte reports on Israel’s long history of covert operations.
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