Crooked Media - What A Day: How SOTU doin'.

Correction: Yesterday’s newsletter described “Biden’s first State of the Union” address. It was meant to have read: “Biden’s first State of the Union in the 118th Congress.” The address was the president’s second State of the Union. 

President Biden’s second State of the Union address, like his first two years in office, exceeded our expectations. And was unlike any we’ve ever seen.
 

• Expectations for President Biden were tempered going into Tuesday night in part due to the incredibly difficult circumstances he faces (a severely divided national electorate, and a batshit opposition party that includes multiple members who showed up for the SOTU prepared to scream at him all night). Biden and his speechwriters made the wise decision to forgo calls for unity in favor of an approach that puts Republicans on the hind foot for opposing the kind of America most Americans want to live in. The rallying cry, which he repeated throughout the address, was “finish the job!”: a tacit jab at Republican officials who stand in the way of essentially all progress 
   

• The speech was not without its snags. Biden stumbled over his words early in the speech several times, but recovered quickly and was more or less always able to land his point. Despite House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s insistence that this state of the union would be “respectful,” his caucus was borderline uncontrollable, audibly heckling the president at several points during the address, prompting McCarthy to shush them. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was particularly animated while dressed as Cruella de Nordstrom Rack, repeatedly shouting “Liar!” at Biden, including when he correctly noted that some members of the Republican Party want Medicare and Social Security to expire.
   

• A word on this: Biden responded by engaging directly with his hecklers. He even got them to applaud Medicare and Social Security and promise not to gut it. And some news outlets have thus portrayed the exchange over those programs, as “negotiating in real-time” with hostage takers, over the debt limit. But that’s not exactly what happened. McCarthy had already taken both programs off the table for budget cuts in his debt ceiling extortion scheme, so Republicans didn’t really concede anything. And Biden didn’t implicitly or explicitly agree to negotiate with a gun to his head over the rest of the budget. They booed because they hate when anyone accurately describes the substance of their agenda. Social Security and Medicare may be off the table for now, but Republicans still support privatizing or phasing out both programs, and the assertion that they “conceded” something to Biden in “negotiations” over the debt limit implies that Biden has agrees that huge cuts to other vital services are still fair game as ransoms to the GOP. 

The State of the Union deteriorating into the British House of Commons With More Spray Tan was chaotic to be sure, but it also seemed to energize Biden.

• Biden was most successful when he recapped what his administration has already delivered, including laws and regulations that will bring manufacturing back to the United States, lower health-care costs for seniors, higher taxes for corporations and a resurgence of unionization. And he was most moving, perhaps unexpectedly, when he spoke about police reform and public safety. He directly addressed the parents of Tyre Nichols, who attended as guests, and deftly expressed the unimaginable pain of parents who have lost children, without feeling compelled to balance that out with “tough on crime” rhetoric. It was a marked improvement on the topic from last year’s speech. He underscored an often-overlooked point that the basis of public safety is public trust, and that trust is deeply broken in many communities across the country.

• Disgraced former president Donald Trump’s former press secretary/nepotism Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) delivered the Republican Party’s official response to the State of the Union, and we probably don’t have to say much more than that. It’s actually kind of breathtaking how boring she is as a public speaker when she has had multiple roles in which that’s the whole job. She decried “left-wing culture war” (very “I know you are, but what am I?”) and said that the dividing line in America is no longer between right and left, “it’s between normal and crazy” (true, but the other way around, which is why Republicans keep losing elections). Hilariously, she highlighted her own “record” since becoming governor: banning critical race theory, repealing pandemic public-health orders, and preventing the state from using terms like “Latinx.” The thread connecting all of those “accomplishments” is that they are totally substance-free, Fox News-inspired right-wing culture war offensives which will do absolutely nothing to improve the lives of average people in her state. 

The divide between the Democratic and Republican speeches was stark. One party offered meaningful ideas and solutions to help the material conditions of millions of people and make this country a more equitable place to live, and the other party offered banning the term “Latinx.” The choice is yours, America!

The death toll from a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and subsequent aftershocks in Turkey and Syria has risen to a staggering 12,000 as rescue efforts continue. 

A city bus in Montreal, Canada, crashed into a daycare center, leaving two children dead and six injured. The bus driver was arrested and charged with homicide and careless driving. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is traveling through various European Union countries (and the U.K. smh Brexit…) this week on a tour of requests for additional arms for his country’s troops as they continue their fight for liberation from Russia. 

Taking her on more official state business, North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un seems to be signaling that his daughter, currently middle-school aged, will be his successor. New nepo baby just dropped!! 

Ukrainian tennis player and Olympic medalist Elina Svitolina has called for a total ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes from the 2024 Paris Games. 

New Zealand authorities reported today that they found more than three tons of cocaine floating in the Pacific Ocean after it was dropped there by an international drug ring. In other news, What A Day will be off tomorrow on a boat in the south pacific.

In a House Oversight Committee show-trial hearing Republicans convened to “prove” Twitter conspired against Donald Trump and other conservatives, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) got Twitter’s former senior safety advisor to admit on the record that Twitter actually changed its own policy regarding certain kinds of hate speech after disgraced former President Trump violated it, effectively blowing up the entire premise of the sham investigation alleging “anti-right-wing bias.”

In the same hearing, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) complained about Twitter having barred anti-vaxx rhetoric from a few fringe doctors contradicting the medical consensus and guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control. She then went on a bizarre tirade about regretting having received the vaccine. I would say “Republicans are not sending their best,” but I think the sad truth is that they actually are!

Corporations have always had a way of squashing progressive policies, and in few states is that more readily apparent than California. In the past two weeks, fast-food companies in the state have collected enough signatures to force a referendum on a law to increase wages for restaurant workers, and oil companies successfully got a measure to qualify for the ballot that would overturn an environmental-safety law that would ban new drilling projects near homes and schools. In 2018, California’s multibillion dollar real-estate industry spent over $75 million to kill Proposition 10, a measure that would have expanded rent control in the state. In 2020, Uber, Lyft, Postmates, and other “gig economy” giants spent over $200 million to pass Proposition 22, allowing such companies to keep treating their workers as “independent contractors” rather than employees entitled to benefits. In all such cases, corporations with bottomless pockets are able to spread as much disinformation as they want and essentially write their own laws. With the two latest corporate-backed referendums, good-government groups, environmentalists, and labor unions are alleging that corporations are abusing the democratic process and intentionally misleading voters into signing petitions. There’s little recourse for misleading voters under California state law, and until comprehensive campaign-finance reform comes to pass, corporations will continue to play a determinant role in legislation at all levels of government.

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Lebron James surpassed Kareem Abdul-Jabar to become the new all-time leading scorer in NBA history with a staggering 38,388 career points.

In a tense exchange before last night’s State of the Union address, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) reportedly told freshman Rep. George Santos (R-NY) “You don’t belong here.” We disagree with him about basically everything else but credit where credit is due, Mitt!