Crooked Media - What A Day: Put THAT in your pipeline

We’re all sick of the fucking debt limit. But we’re also less than four days away from a global economic meltdown courtesy of the GOP, so we gotta talk about it. I don’t make the rules.
 

• On Wednesday night, a bipartisan coalition in the House of Representatives passed the ransom note bill to raise the debt ceiling 314-117. Members on both ends of the political spectrum comprised much of the bill’s opposition. The bill faces possible changes, stiffer competition, and more procedural chokepoints in the Senate, all while lawmakers race against the clock to get it passed before June 5, the date the Treasury has projected the U.S. will run out of borrowing authority. Without that: sorry nana, sorry bond holders in China, not enough money to pay what we owe.
   

• Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Thursday that the upper chamber will remain in session until President Biden gets the bill for signature. He urged members of his caucus not to offer amendments, which, if passed, would send the bill back to the House. That plan is already out the window. In some rare productive infighting, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) introduced an amendment to the debt-limit bill  that would rescind its approval of the controversial Mountain Valley pipeline backed by Fossil-Fuel King Sen. Joe Manchin (W-VA). 
   

• The 300-mile pipeline would stretch between northwest West Virginia and southern Virginia, and the delegation of Virginia Democrats in Congress has vocally opposed it from the beginning. Kaine rightly pointed out that the pipeline has nothing to do with the debt limit and had already announced that he would file this amendment earlier in the week. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ed Markey (D-MA), our very good boys, both cited the provisions on the pipeline and fossil-fuel development in their statements announcing that they would vote against the bill.

It looks like Senate Republicans are gearing up to get amendment-happy as well. 
 

• Under the Biden-McCarthy agreement, non-defense spending will remain mostly flat, while the military will, you guessed it, get a big fat increase. But that simply isn’t enough for the war hawks in the GOP who are very scared that China’s military will overpower America’s. Do they care that 11 million children in the United States live in poverty that could be alleviated by what would amount to a rounding error in the defense budget? They do not! Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) went on Fox News Wednesday night to claim the deal (which again, will increase an already-staggering $886 billion defense budget by 3.3 percent) is “a disaster for the United States military.” 
   

• A number of senators want to force votes on amendments to the bill that will retard the process. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) says he will agree to an expedited agreement but only if his amendment gets a vote, and he estimated that there would be between 10 and 12 amendments total. That’s…not great, given how ponderous our blubbering senators can be! Nevertheless, most of them seem confident that the bill will pass by Thursday night. Hard-right Senators like Lee, Graham, and Rand Paul (R-KY) have all but promised to gum up the works unless the bill adopts more aggressive spending cuts to all non-defense programs. 

It’s gonna be a long night. Next week should be fun, too!

The Trans community has been under attack by right-wing politicians across the country. But don’t let their noisy stunts fool you. They’re a loud, wrong minority, like John Mayer fans, or people who blame flight attendants for the delay. In reality, there’s never been more support for gay, trans and queer youth than right now, and it’s up to us to make that true, today and every day. 

That’s why Vote Save America has launched their Fuck Bans: Leave Queer Kids Alone fund. This Pride month, Crooked is working to help fundraise $50,000 to support groups on the ground in states that are banning care and targeting trans families including organizations like the Transgender Law Center, the Trans Justice Funding Project, and the Trans Youth Equality Foundation. If you’re interested in chipping in, head to votesaveamerica.com/fuckbans to donate! 

Pissing off some of the GOP’s biggest creeps is just an added bonus.

In a frightening harbinger of the climate crisis to come, state lawmakers in Arizona have decided to halt housing construction that has already been approved in the Phoenix area, as well prohibit developers from building some new subdivisions, due to the dwindling water supply. Phoenix and its suburbs reside in Maricopa County, which receives more than half of its water supply from groundwater, while the rest comes from rivers, aqueducts, and recycled wastewater. But unlike some of the latter sources, groundwater is a finite resource, and can take thousands of years or longer to replenish. This halt in housing development will increase real-estate prices, and is likely to continue across the American southwest if climate change continues to go unaddressed and the 23-year drought in the region persists. But yeah, give another trillion dollars in federal funding to the military!

The Federal Trade Commission disclosed in a Wednesday court filing that a former employee of Amazon’s Ring doorbell-camera unit spied on female customers for months in 2017 using cameras placed in bedrooms and bathrooms. The company will pay a $5.8 million settlement for privacy violations.

The Supreme Court dealt another blow to organized labor on Thursday in a ruling that will make it easier for employers to sue over strikes that cause property destruction. The (yikes) 8-1 decision sided with a Washington state concrete business, which sued the union representing its truck drivers when they were on strike. 

President Biden tripped over a sandbag and fell onstage after delivering an address at the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony (but he got right back up!). Surprisingly agile for an octogenarian. 

Speaking of the Air Force, a new report shows that it tested a drone enabled by artificial intelligence to destroy specific targets, but when a human operator tried to override the drone’s mission, the A.I. ordered the drone to attack the human operator so the mission could be completed. Hasta la vista, baby? 

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is reportedly planning to give January 6 security footage to far-right conspiracy theorist and avowed election denier Julie Kelly. Man, this guy is a non-stop great-decision machine. 

Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) national security adviser has resigned after the Washington Post reported that he was behind the senator's, ahem, controversial strategy of stalling military nominations in an attempt to stop a new DOD policy that helps ensure abortion access for service members. 

The stock market ticked up on Thursday as the bill to avert a GOP-imposed global financial crisis advanced through Congress.

Russian President Vladimir Putin repeatedly threatened to retaliate against the United States if it crossed an ambiguous “red line” of excessive interference in defense of Ukraine. Nevertheless, the White House persisted. Last month, President Biden announced that the United States would help Ukraine obtain F-16 fighter jets, on top of the missiles, rocket launchers, advanced missile defense systems, drones, helicopters, and tanks it has already supplied or helped Kyiv obtain. So why are our national security officials ignoring Putin’s threats? Because of a general consensus since the war began that Putin’s threats have been all hot air. As Maxim Samorukov, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, observed, the Kremlin “has devalued its red lines so many times by saying certain things would be unacceptable and then doing nothing when they happen.” Russia’s demonstrated reluctance to retaliate has been the driving force behind Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s decision to encourage the White House and Western allies to do more. But Western officials know that Putin’s hesitancy is not fixed, and could easily change if the war persists. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley estimated in a recent interview with Foreign Affairs that Russia has suffered as many as 250,000 casualties since it invaded Ukraine.

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Billionaire troll and Twitter CEO Elon Musk is accused of insider trading in a class-action lawsuit, which alleges he intentionally manipulated the price of Dogecoin when he replaced Twitter’s bird logo with the Dogecoin logo, leading to a 30 percent jump in the coin’s price. In a hilarious coincidence, he did that riiigghttt before he sold $124 million worth of the currency. 
 

Nine Democratic governors have sent a letter to leading textbook companies expressing opposition to GOP-demanded changes to textbooks and to warn them that they will be watching for the “inappropriate censor[ship]” of “comprehensive and accurate educational information.”
 

Happy first day of Pride Month to all of our LGBTQ+ pals out there!