July 11 2024
Bad Biden news; GOP split; FTC to sue PBMs; phones in school; Russian Wikipedia
1 ELECTION 2024 Major Dem lawmakers question Biden candidacy as donors cut off funds
2 ELECTION 2024 Republican Party united behind Trump, split on policy
3 FTC to sue Pharmacy Benefit Managers
4 Youngkin bans phones in schools
5 The Kremlin is rewriting Wikipedia
7/11/1804 Aaron Burr kills Alexander Hamilton in duel
see ad astra on x @greg_loving
1 ELECTION 2024 Major Dem lawmakers question Biden candidacy as donors cut off funds
Joe Biden will give what his press team described as a “big boy” press conference as the NATO summit concludes. He hopes to convince Democratic lawmakers, European allies and the American public that he is fit for office. He will also participate in a second primetime television interview, airing on NBC on Monday night—the same day the Republican National Convention begins. Behind the scenes, Mr Biden’s campaign advisers will try to quell the growing rebellion against his candidacy by meeting Democratic senators on Thursday. Three more Democratic lawmakers publicly called on him to leave the presidential race on Wednesday, including Peter Welch, the first senator to join the dissenters. Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, did not back Mr Biden when asked about his re-election bid, saying that he must decide quickly whether he is staying in the race despite the fact that he has repeated many times that he has already made up his mind to stick it out. Ms Pelosi said that she told her colleagues to “just hold off” from public comments until this week’s NATO summit wraps up.
Economist
Democratic donors have warned that funding for the November election effort is “drying up” because of President Joe Biden’s refusal to step aside, threatening to undermine the party’s effort to defeat Donald Trump. Donors have become a crucial constituency in the fight over Biden’s future, with some pushing aggressively for him to withdraw even as the party’s lawmakers on Capitol Hill waver over his candidacy. Their increasing willingness to walk away from the campaign, mentioned in interviews with donors from Wall Street to Hollywood, poses a new existential risk to Biden’s re-election if he stays in a White House race expected to be the most expensive in US history. “As of today, it would be very difficult to raise major donor money for the president,” said one New York-based Democratic donor. “It is so quickly unravelling that it is going to be extraordinarily difficult for him to stay in the race.”
FT
Article Source: Economist, FT
2 ELECTION 2024 Republican Party united behind Trump, split on policy
Republicans will gather for their convention in Milwaukee next week united behind presidential candidate Donald Trump but divided on what the party stands for. There are, of course, widely aired disagreements over abortion and the war in Ukraine. But a potentially more consequential division has opened over economics. On one side is a pro-business libertarian wing that backs low taxes, free trade and international openness. On the other is a growing contingent of conservatives skeptical of big business, ambivalent about tax cuts and vocally supportive of tariffs. While both wings back Trump, who straddles this divide, they have different priorities should Trump win this fall’s election and Republicans retake control of Congress. Which side prevails has huge implications for the economy and business. The new Republican thinking was evident this week at the annual meeting of “national conservatism,” one of many labels attached to the new movement (along with the “new right,” “populist right” and “conservative economics”). Speakers interspersed attacks on the “Marxist” and “radical” left with condemnation of the “corporatist right,” “free marketism” and “globalism.” “Look at the libertarians who helped Ronald Reagan rescue the U.S. economy, then descended into hyperindividualism, materialism and globalism that has rendered them a political irrelevancy,” declared Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which has remade itself from a free-market think tank into a bastion of national conservatism.
Article Source: WSJ
3 FTC to sue Pharmacy Benefit Managers
The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to sue the largest three pharmacy-benefit managers over their tactics for negotiating prices for drugs including insulin, after a two-year investigation into whether the companies steer patients away from less-expensive medicines. The agency plans to file lawsuits taking aim at business practices related to rebates brokered with drug manufacturers, people familiar with the matter said. The FTC is also investigating the role that insulin manufacturers play in the negotiations, one of the people said. Pharmacy-benefit managers, or PBMs, manage prescription-drug transactions for insurers and employers. They negotiate discounts with drug manufacturers on behalf of those customers.
Article Source: WSJ
4 Youngkin bans phones in schools
Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, issued an executive order banning smartphones in the state’s public schools, arguing that it is time “to address the damage of social media and screens”. Last month Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, said he planned to extend similar restrictions in his state. Although bans may have some bipartisan support, they are generally unpopular among parents.
Article Source: Economist
5 The Kremlin is rewriting Wikipedia
Wikipedia had faced trouble from the Kremlin before, with Russian censors threatening it almost from the start of the Ukraine war in 2014. But it was only in late 2023, with the appearance of glitzy ads across Moscow, that a serious plan to replace it became clear. RuWiki, as the censors’ project is known, is mostly a straightforward copy of Wikipedia. But the most sensitive moments of history have been left out or rewritten. The Kremlin’s ideologues hope that millions of Russians will now embrace these new versions as the truth. The RuWiki project might be called Orwellian, if the author were not himself occasionally censored. The entry on “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, for example, omits the regular site’s description of Winston Smith’s Ministry of Truth, where historical records are “corrected” (though Smith’s job gets a mention elsewhere). RuWiki’s rewriters hack their way through the sensitive zones of Putinist ideology: lgbt rights, oral sex, Soviet history and the war in Ukraine. Russian atrocities in Bucha, near Kyiv, in 2022 are reimagined as a “Ukrainian and Western disinformation campaign”. Kherson, a Ukrainian city being destroyed by Russian bombs, is mentioned without a word about the war. The execution of 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn in 1940 is rewritten to cast doubt on the archive documents proving it was done by Soviet secret services. And all references to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was killed in prison in February 2024, are altered to describe him as a mere “blogger”.
Article Source: Economist
7/11/1804 Aaron Burr kills Alexander Hamilton in duel
Sources
1. https://on.ft.com/3zFa1gD
2. https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/republicans-are-fracturing-on-the-economy-0d76de9e
3. https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/ftc-to-sue-drug-managers-over-insulin-prices-b46af71f?st=pm2a0ru2jdjyxck&reflink=article_copyURL_share
4. Newsletter
5. https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/07/09/the-kremlin-is-rewriting-wikipedia
Thanks for reading!
