Vox Sentences: Bernie-or-Busters got nothing on what’s happening in the UK

President Obama delivers his fourth consecutive address to the DNC; the Labour Party's second leadership race in as many years gets underway; Japan considers some very drastic measures.

TOP NEWS

"Let's elect a sane, competent person"

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• We're at the final day of the Democratic National Convention, and the night's big speaker is Hillary Clinton herself — along with Chelsea, Govs. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) and Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). The Clinton campaign offered an impressively vague preview to the New York Times.

  [NYT / Adam Nagourney and Jeremy Peters]

• Last night was the most jam-packed event of the week, with speeches from Vice President Joe Biden, VP nominee Tim Kaine, and President Obama, who echoed the unifying themes of his breakout speech at the 2004 DNC.

  [Politico]

• One interesting wrinkle: Obama, and the other speakers, enthusiastically adopted traditional GOP messaging about American exceptionalism, hope, the greatness of the founders, etc.

  [NYT / Alan Rappeport]

• At the same time, a careful comparison of 2004 and 2016 Obama shows that the rhetoric of hope, while still present, has diminished. It's hard to imagine the 2004 Obama warning Americans about the dangers of autocracy.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Kaine, in a jocular, "fun dad" manner, used his speech to burnish his reputation as a fundamentally decent guy and, in the process, paint Democrats as the party of moral values.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Biden gave the most aggressively middle class–focused speech of the convention so far, a reminder of how powerful a candidate against Trump he might have been had he run in the primaries.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Michael Bloomberg made a notable appearance, including an awkward jibe at Democrats' ties to teachers unions, in a speech meant to appeal to independents. But he might have gotten the best one-liner of the night: "Let's elect a sane, competent person."

  [NY Mag / Jonathan Chait]

• As for tonight, don't expect a barnburner from Clinton. Her specialty is collaborative work that's heavy on listening — a good skill in governance, but not super helpful when doing public speeches.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

There's no factionalism like left factionalism like no factionalism I know

Jack Taylor/Getty Images

• So remember how Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK's Labour Party, was facing an internal revolt by less radical Labour members of Parliament angry over his weak campaigning against Brexit?

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• An update is in order. First, Angela Eagle, the veteran MP who initially challenged Corbyn, has dropped out and endorsed Owen Smith, who, unlike her, opposed the Iraq War and was viewed as having a better chance of beating Corbyn.

  [WSJ / Alexis Flynn]

• Now Smith is laying out his agenda. The weird part is that he's trying to out-lefty Corbyn with "radical" proposals (his word) like a 50 percent top income tax rate, an additional 15 percent tax on unearned investment income, and a commitment to "equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity."

  [Owen Smith]

• Smith's apparent goal is to reshape the contest from a referendum on Corbyn's arch-leftism, which Smith is seeking to emulate, to a referendum on which of the two has more detailed policy proposals and a better style for achieving democratic socialism.

  [The Guardian / Anushka Asthana]

• The left turn is a bit of an uncomfortable fit given Smith's past as a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist before he entered Parliament.

  [The Guardian / Holly Watt and David Pegg]

• So far, Smith's efforts haven't really been working. While a large majority of Britons would rather see him leading Labour, he's losing among Labour voters by about 20 points.

  [BMG Research]

Helicopter Abe

Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images

• The Bank of Japan is expected to announce major new stimulus measures on Friday, under considerable pressure from the government as the country continues to struggle with anemic growth and too-low inflation.

  [Reuters / Leika Kihara and Minami Funakoshi]

• Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has consistently pushed an agenda of heavy fiscal and monetary stimulus, announced another $265 billion fiscal package this week, increasing the pressure on the bank to ease as well.

  [Bloomberg / Enda Curran and Toru Fujioka]

• The most exciting possibility is that the bank will be the first major institution to try "helicopter money": directly financing government spending or tax cuts by printing money out of thin air.

  [NYT / Neil Irwin]

• Last month, BOJ governor Haruhiko Kuroda suggested he didn't want to go that route and instead wanted to stay with quantitative easing (buying up trillions of yen worth of government bonds) and negative interest rates (which punish individuals and firms for hoarding cash and encourage them to spend and invest).

  [Bloomberg / James Mayger and Toru Fujioka]

• But the bank buying up yet more government debt, in conjunction with Abe's new stimulus measures, adds up to something pretty close to helicopter money. What would tip things over the edge is if the government started issuing, and BOJ started buying, "perpetual bonds": debt that the government doesn't have to pay back. Ben Bernanke has suggested Japan should try this.

  [Bloomberg / Toru Fujioka and Keiko Ujikane]

• The biggest long-term challenge for Japan can't be solved by monetary policy, however, even exotic policy like helicopter money. The big problem is the country's population is shrinking, and it's not having enough kids or taking in enough immigrants to reverse that.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

MISCELLANEOUS

Let me be clear: President Obama does not actually count out the number of almonds he's allowed to eat every night. [NYT / Michael Shear]

• The only quiz that matters: Pokémon, or cholesterol medication?

  [Slate / Jacob Brogan, Henry Grabar, and Chris Kirk]

• Word2vec is an immensely powerful neural network that helps computers produce analogies in natural language (e.g. "man : king :: woman : queen"). Too bad it's ridiculously sexist.

  [Technology Review]

• Jupiter's Great Red Spot, an ongoing storm the size of two or three Earths combined, is the hottest point on the planet, and astronomers think they know why: It's so loud that it creates tons of heat.

  [WSJ / Robert Lee Hotz]

• Are you better off than you were eight years ago? Here are 20 key metrics to help answer that.

  [Mother Jones / Kevin Drum]

VERBATIM

"When two persons in search of a pokémon clash at the corner of Sunset in San Vicente is there violence? Is there murder?" [Werner Herzog to The Verge / Emily Yoshida]

• "The [anthrax] outbreak is thought to stem from a reindeer carcass that died in the plague 75 years ago. As the old flesh thawed, the bacteria once again became active."

  [Washington Post / Ben Guarino]

• "Expanded social insurance, profit-sharing, and government intervention to push corporate America into more socially useful investment: This is now the agenda of the Democratic Party's right wing."

  [NY Mag / Eric Levitz]

• "An Orlando man was charged with possession of crystal meth with a gun, but a state crime lab proved him right — it was actually glaze from Krispy Kreme doughnuts."

  [Miami Herald / Alex Harris]

• "Appearing in an Oscar-award-winning film was one of the least interesting things David Bald Eagle ever did. … He danced with Marilyn Monroe. He drove race cars. He parachuted into enemy gunfire at Normandy. He played professional baseball. He was a leader not just of his tribe, but of the United Native Nations."

  [NPR / Camila Domonoske]

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