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Says it all.

An important Fact Check The timeline is riddled with errors. The excellent Torri Otten at TNR fact checked it: Out of the 106 dates listed in the timeline, only four are instances when Biden met someone related to Hunter’s business dealings. The timeline says that on December 4, 2013, Biden traveled to China with his son and met with Jonathan Li, the CEO of Chinese company Bohai Harvest, or BHR. Hunter later joined the BHR board. While the timeline makes it sound like Biden went to China specifically to meet his son’s potential colleague, in reality, the then vice president went to Beijing on an official trip on behalf of the White House. He brought his son and one of his grandchildren along, as well as several reporters who noted it was common for Biden to bring family members in tow. While Hunter had business meetings with Li, Biden only met Li once. Hunter arranged for them to shake hands, but the two men did not interact further on the trip. The timeline also says that Biden met Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, at a dinner Hunter hosted in Washington, D.C., on March 20, 2015.

A rare patternless giraffe was born last month at a family-owned zoo in Tennessee—and experts say she may be the only completely brown giraffe alive on the planet, report Emily Hibbitts and Clarice Scheele for WJHL. Though her appearance is unusual, the six-foot-tall calf appears healthy and is thriving under her mother’s care, Brights Zoo officials tell the publication.  “She is very inquisitive,” David Bright, the zoo’s director, tells Insider’s Fern McErlane and Grace Eliza Goodwin. “She stays very tight with her mom, doesn’t wander off too far, but she’s very curious what’s going on around her. She has a very positive personality when it comes to giraffes.” The calf is a reticulated giraffe (Giraffa reticulata), one of four giraffe species—until 2016, scientists recognized only one species of giraffe. The last known spotless reticulated giraffe was likely Toshiko, a calf born in 1972 in Tokyo, writes Caitlin O’Kane for CBS News. Only two others have ever been recorded—the older sibling of Toshiko and an individual in Uganda, per Insider.

Insufficient funds still Thousands gather today at the Lincoln Memorial for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. There in 1963 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech to more than 200,000 there to demand America make good on its promise. Today, King’s granite statue stands nearby as another memorial to consequential figures in American history. The civil rights movement, its speeches and marches, the white violence against protesters’ demands for Black equality, led after the assasination of President Kennedy later that year to passage of the transformational Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts under his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Decades of backlash to that cultural transformation today threaten that still-unfulfilled dream (Washington Post): In the wake of court rulings, legislation and political extremism that organizers say has undone or stymied crucial racial and social progress, the rally’s leaders say they plan not a commemoration, but a reassertion of the demands made at the Memorial in 1963.

It’s not real, but nicely done. Thursday was a busy night for memes. Also…. Mark Meadows’ booking height/weight: 6′-1″, 240 lbs. Donald Trump’s booking height/weight: 6′-3″, 215 lbs. And I was so looking forward to “THE SCALE WAS RIGGED. IT WAS A DISGUSTING DEMOCRATIC SCALE. FAKE NEWS!”

Call me skeptical At a mixer last night, a friend mentioned the Democratic Data Exchange referenced recently at Axios: The database, run by an independent firm called Democratic Data Exchange (DDx), allows Democrats and allied groups — campaigns, state parties, super PACs and hundreds more — to bridge a longtime inability to share information. It’s a legal workaround. DDx allows 501(c) nonprofit groups to pool data with campaigns and the party that their nonprofit status otherwise prohibits. They cannot formally coordinate. Here groups just dump data into a pool that other allied groups can draw out of. The GOP has one too. Efficiency, huh? Back in the corporate world, when buzzwords like “efficiency” and “shareholder value” began circulating in the office it was time to update your resume. Listen, I do a lot of voting data analysis. Enough that I regularly hear Darth Vader in my head insisting, “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.” Not that this DDx effort is not worthwhile, but it’s doubling down on microtargeting.

Once in a while, as I peruse the morning headlines, I can’t help but ask myself: What would I have thought if I’d seen these stories 10 years ago? I’m always shaken by what it looks like from that perspective. It’s not as if shocking events hadn’t taken place in the decade before that. The 9/11 attacks came as a total shock and the financial crisis of 2008 was as close as I’d ever come to experiencing cataclysmic economic dislocation. But those, at least, were on par with historical world events like Pearl Harbor and the Great Depression, so there was a sense that they were not entirely unprecedented. On Thursday I read headlines that former President Donald Trump was turning himself in to be arrested for the fourth time, two of those arrests stemming from his attempt to overturn the election in 2020, another for stealing classified documents and yet another for illegally paying hush money to a porn star with whom he’d had an affair.

Everything is tribal and the election may be as close as always these days. But my money’s on the blue team.

Politico/Ipsos polls asked whether the public is taking these indictments seriously: The survey results suggest Americans are taking the cases seriously — particularly the Justice Department’s 2020 election case — and that most people are skeptical of Trump’s claim to be the victim of a legally baseless witch hunt or an elaborate, multi-jurisdictional effort to “weaponize” law enforcement authorities against him. Furthermore, public sentiment in certain areas — including how quickly to hold a trial and whether to incarcerate Trump if he’s convicted — is moving against the former president when compared to a previous POLITICO Magazine/Ipsos poll conducted in June. This latest poll was conducted from Aug. 18 to Aug. 21, roughly two-and-a-half weeks after Trump’s second federal indictment and several days after Trump was criminally charged in Fulton County. The poll had a sample of 1,032 adults, age 18 or older, who were interviewed online; it has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points for all respondents. Here are some of the most notable findings from our latest survey.

Today is the last official day that the Office of Digital Learning has space in Old Science Hall. Furniture and boxes were loaded up this morning. One of my favorite campus stories at OU is how Old Science Hall got its name. Science Hall, built in 1893, was the very first building on campus, but […]