Kamala Harris unveils Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as running mate | The Excerpt
On Wednesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: USA TODAY White House Correspondent Joey Garrison breaks down Vice President Kamala Harris' choice for a running mate. An Iran-linked plotter who may have targeted former President Donald Trump has been arrested. The EPA bans a pesticide in a historic move. The stock market recovers after days of losses. USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise discusses what fossils tell us about 'ancient hobbits.'
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Wednesday, August 7th, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, Harris has unveiled her running mate, plus an Iran-linked plotter who may have targeted Donald Trump has been arrested, and we talk about new findings surrounding small ancient cousins of humans.
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Vice President Kamala Harris introduced Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate during a rally in Philadelphia yesterday evening. And Walz used the opportunity to immediately go after former president Donald Trump.
Tim Walz:
Donald Trump sees the world a little differently than us. First of all, he doesn't know the first thing about service. He doesn't have time for it because he's too busy serving himself.
Taylor Wilson:
Walz also issued a debate challenge to his Republican opponent, Senator J. D. Vance. For his part, Trump did not immediately issue a statement on Walz's selection, though he did criticize him in a text to donors. Trump also said he'll be doing an interview with Elon Musk on Monday.
For more on the latest running mate to enter this year's race, my colleague Dana Taylor, spoke with USA TODAY, White House Correspondent Joey Garrison.
Dana Taylor:
Joey, thanks for hopping on The Excerpt.
Joey Garrison:
Hey, thanks for having me on.
Dana Taylor:
What should we know about Tim Walz? Tell us about his background.
Joey Garrison:
The background and the biography of Tim Walz is one of the things that really attracted Kamala Harris to make him her vice presidential pick. They very much see him as sort of the common man, Midwest roots. He spent 24 years in the National Guard, was a high school teacher and football coach, served in Congress where he represented a district that would vote for Donald Trump at one point in 2016. And so they believe he has crossover to rural voters. Then he became elected governor a couple of years ago. In that role, he's really pushed a progressive record on a number of issues whilst still maintaining his core values to working class voters and rural voters. So I think it was that mix and that possibility that he could be a big messenger in key Midwest battleground states that ultimately gave him the nod over other contenders.
Dana Taylor:
Yeah. I was going to ask, because she had lots of options, what factored into this decision for the Harris campaign?
Joey Garrison:
Well, so I think in the end it became down as has been widely reported between Tim Walz of Minnesota, ultimately the pick, and Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania. Now, Shapiro was appealing for several reasons. He is one of the real talented young crop of governors out there for Democrats, but also wildly popular in Pennsylvania, which really, if you look at the electoral map, that's the most important state for Democrats to win, really any pathway towards a victory runs through Pennsylvania. But there were some concerns aired about him from progressives. There were concerns about what his policy with Israel would be in the ongoing war between Israel, Hamas and Gaza. He's also taken some very conservative stances, namely Shapiro supports school vouchers that of course allow public money to go towards private schools. That's something that Democrats historically don't support. So he would've rubbed unions, teachers unions, others, the wrong way.
Shapiro ended up being a riskier possibility for repeat than I think Walz was, really, anyone you talk to has nice things to say about Walz as a person. And again, this ability for him to be the messenger, I think prosecuting the case against Trump really weighed heavily on Harris. It was Walz after all who was coined this new attack line against Trump and Vance, that they are, quote, "weird". That's kind of taken off. It was almost in a shift of framing the race so dramatically like Biden did with democracy being at stake. Instead, he's tried to say, "Hey, look, these people on the right, these Trump Republicans are just a bunch of weirdos with their policy." And that's something that's kind of caught fire.
Dana Taylor:
Joey, we know that the VP pick will potentially be one heartbeat away. I'm not minimizing that, but in terms of winning a presidential election, how important is a candidate's VP pick?
Joey Garrison:
Well, I think most studies show it's ultimately not the most important factor. Maybe it could skew a race by half percentage point to a point, but I do think, I mentioned Pennsylvania, but also Wisconsin and Michigan. Those are states really the Harris needs to desperately win in order to win this race. And if he can make Harris more appealing to a lot of blue collar voters, these are voters who have drifted over to the Republican side towards Trump in recent elections. And that's how Trump has really ran up the score in a lot of these rural counties. If Walz can help limit that and just allow Harris to do a little bit better among these voters, then that can go a long way in winning some of these states.
Dana Taylor:
As we've mentioned, Tim Walz is the governor of Minnesota, which is not a swing state. What does this pick do for the Democrats?
Joey Garrison:
The ticket of Harris and Walz are going to go to Michigan, Wisconsin. You're going to see him deployed over and over in those crucial states trying to articulate this message. He's going to blast Trump as wanting to support the corporations and the wealthiest Americans with tax cuts. And he's going to position himself with Harris as the candidates for the working class and then fighting for the middle class, and that's what he brings to the ticket.
Dana Taylor:
Really appreciate your insights here, Joey. Joey Garrison is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY.
Joey Garrison:
Hey, thanks so much.
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Taylor Wilson:
A Pakistani national with ties to Iran who may have targeted Donald Trump has been charged with murder for hire as part of a plot to assassinate a US politician or government official, potentially in response to the Trump administration's 2020 killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. That's according to a criminal complaint unsealed yesterday. Asif Merchant arrived in the US around April and contacted a person he believed could help him carry out the scheme, the Department of Justice alleged. But that person told law enforcement about Merchant's plans and became a confidential source. The charges came weeks after an attempted assassination of Trump at a Pennsylvania political rally, but a law enforcement officials said investigators so far have not uncovered evidence linking Merchant to the Pennsylvania attack by twenty-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks.
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For the first time in 40 years, the US Environmental Protection Agency has taken emergency action to suspend the use of a pesticide found to cause irreversible damage to fetuses when they're exposed in utero. The pesticide known as DCPA or Dacthal has been linked to low birth weight babies who later in life have been shown to have decreased IQ and impaired brain development and motor skills. Michal Friedhoff, assistant administrator for the EPA's office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention said in a statement yesterday, quote, "DCPA is so dangerous that it needs to be removed from the market immediately", unquote. According to an EPA report, the pesticide was first introduced in 1958 to control weeds in agricultural and non-agricultural settings, primarily for crops like broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and onions.
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Following three days of losses, including Monday's selloff, the three major US indexes regained ground yesterday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq and S&P 500 rose just over 1%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average improved around three quarters of a percentage point. The economic news that dented investor confidence came Friday when the Department of Labor reported US economy created fewer jobs in July than expected, and the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%. The unemployment rate has ticked up in every month of 2024 except February. Still, the economy created jobs in July, and the jobless rate remains historically low. You can read more about those complicated factors, and whether last week's job numbers raised the risk of a recession with a link in today's show notes.
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Ancient hobbits were even smaller than previously thought. I spoke with USA TODAY National Correspondent, Elizabeth Weise to learn more. Beth, thanks for hopping on.
Elizabeth Weise:
Happy to be here as always.
Taylor Wilson:
So this sounds like something out of middle earth, but it's not from a Tolkien novel. What were these hobbit-like species that were cousins to modern humans? What do the fossils tell us?
Elizabeth Weise:
This species is called Homo floresiensis, which means the people who live on the island of Flores, and it's why we call them hobbits because it is hard to say. I can handle Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, but this one is hard. So anyway, so these hobbits, what we think happened was 1.1 million years ago, Homo erectus, which was the upright man, a human species of which there have been many, we're the only ones left, Homo sapiens. So these Homo erectus beings lived on Java in what is now Indonesia, and some of them got over to the island of Flores, which is across like six or seven miles of really gnarly ocean water. So not an easy place to get. And they stayed there and nobody else came. And what happens on an island species, and we know this because there's multiple examples, if you are a large ish animal that ends up on an island and you have no major predators, so you got nothing that requires you to stay big and strong, you will shrink.
It's happened with elephants or mastodons, which are precursor to elephants, with deer, with cattle, a lot of different species because there's no evolutionary pressure to stay big if there's nothing that you have to fight off. There's a lot of evolutionary pressure to get smaller because you require less food and you can reproduce easier. And so what they think happened is Homo erectus somehow got over to Flores, which is an island like the size of Puerto Rico. And there were Komodo dragons and these big flightless birds, but not things that would actually go out of their way to eat people. And so they just got smaller and smaller and smaller until they ended up about three feet high, which is why they're called hobbits in the popular press. And they seem to have lived on this island for about 500,000 years. And then they disappeared about 50,000 years ago, which years plus or minus a few thousand years is about when Homo sapiens started to show up in the area. So did we have a role in making them disappear or not? We don't know.
Taylor Wilson:
Well, I wanted to get to that exact question. I mean, we noticed that these archaic humans are not roaming the world with us nowadays, Beth. So is that really kind of the working theory that they didn't have big predators for a long time, but then modern humans come through and kind of push them out?
Elizabeth Weise:
Well, when you talk to scientists of any stripe, but especially paleontologists and anthropologists, they're like, "Well, we can't possibly know, and how could we ever know?" But there's a fair amount of evidence. I mean, Homo sapiens are very smart. We can be very aggressive. We can be pretty warlike, as you notice just by looking at the news. Everywhere we popped up that there were other human species living, you will note those other human species are now gone. So it's kind of a draw your own conclusions.
Taylor Wilson:
So I'm curious, Beth, what can we learn really by studying early human fossils in this way? Why is this work so important?
Elizabeth Weise:
When I was a kid, you kind of grew up and you're like, "Oh yeah, there were cavemen, and then there were people." And that's kind of how it went. And now we're finding out that there were all these other human species floating around the planet. I mean, not just the Neanderthals, but the Denisovans and the hobbits. And we can see how evolution played out. So what this paper found is, so the first fossils were found from these people, they were about a hundred to 60,000 years ago. But nearby, like 85 miles away on the same island, they found fossils that go back 700,000 years ago. And these were relatively intelligent beings.
I mean, they weren't Homo sapiens, but they probably had fire. They seemed to have made stone tools. And who knows, would they have evolved into something more intelligent? We don't know. And the fossils that they're writing about in this paper are ones that are much older than the first group they found. So these are what? 700,000 years ago, they may even have gotten a little tiny bit smaller in that first 300,000 years they were on the island. And then they might've gotten a little bit larger. But if you see the reconstructions on their skulls, they look human-like. And they were three feet tall, the adults, and their stocking feet wandering around this island making stone tools. It's fascinating to think of all the different types of humans that have been on the planet.
Taylor Wilson:
It's absolutely fascinating. And folks, if they're curious, can find a picture in your piece, Beth, with a link in today's show notes. Elizabeth Weise, a national correspondent with USA TODAY. Thank you, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
Thanks so much.
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Taylor Wilson:
Nancy Pelosi has been the most powerful woman in American history. She was the first female speaker of the house and remains an influential adviser to presidents, including Joe Biden in recent weeks. She was instrumental in passing everything from the 2008 financial bailouts to the Affordable Care Act. But in her new book, The Art of Power, Pelosi starts out not with a legislative triumph, but with a personal tragedy when her husband was brutally attacked by an intruder who was searching for her. USA TODAY, Washington Bureau Chief, Susan Page recently sat down with Pelosi to talk about what the book meant to her. You can hear part of that conversation with a special episode of The Excerpt later today, right here on this feed. You can find the episode after four P.M. Eastern Time. And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson. Back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kamala Harris chose Minn. Gov. Tim Walz as running mate | The Excerpt