Crooked Media - All along the botch tower

- GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, capturing the spirit of the second presidential primary debate.

The House GOP is pushing the United States towards a full-scale government shutdown, and, we gotta be honest, they don’t seem too concerned about it!
 

• Two days before the deadline to NOT shut down the government,  House Republicans decided to spend a few hours bungling their sham impeachment inquiry of President Biden. The hearings began on Thursday, led by House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer. At one point, Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) asked his fellow Oversight Committee members if they would “raise their hands if you believe both Hunter and Trump should be held accountable for any of the indictments if convicted,” and folks, you’re simply not going to believe this, but only the panel’s Democrats did. 
   

• Republicans have insisted baselessly for months that Biden is guilty of criminal wrongdoing, mainly as it relates to his adult son Hunter Biden’s business dealings, but after years of investigation, they have failed to produce any actual supporting evidence. The beginning of this show trial did not reverse their fortune, and Republicans continued running into snags. Namely, their “star witnesses” threw cold water on GOP claims multiple times on Thursday. Forensic accountant Bruce Dubinsky said on the witness stand, "I am not here today to even suggest that there was corruption, fraud, or wrongdoing. More information needs to be gathered before I can make such an assessment.”
   

• Another of the GOP’s first witnesses was Jonathan Turley, a Republican-aligned legal scholar (read: disgraced professor with tenure) who previously worked in the Justice Department as a tax attorney, and who testified during both the Clinton and Trump impeachments. Turley was meant to help analyze the Biden family’s business transactions in this hearing. Unfortunately for the House GOP, his prepared statement was read as follows: “I have previously stated that, while I believe that an impeachment inquiry is warranted, I do not believe that the evidence currently meets the standard of a high crime and misdemeanor needed for an article of impeachment.” Lol. Furthermore, he went on, “I do not believe that the current evidence would support articles of impeachment…They’re merely allegations and they should not become presumptions of impeachable conduct.” Cool! Great use of everyone’s time!

If they thought the botched hearing would deflect attention from the looming shutdown, the Oversight Committee’s ranking Democrat Jamie Raskin reminded everyone by displaying a countdown clock during the hearings. 
 

• Congress has fewer than three days to reach a deal to avoid a government shutdown, and House GOP leadership still doesn’t have a plan. The Democratic-led Senate continued on with a bipartisan stopgap funding bill, but House Republicans remain uninterested in averting the fourth potential government shutdown in the past decade. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s speakership hangs in the balance, but so does the U.S. government’s creditworthiness, which one major ratings agency already downgraded earlier this year after House Republicans took us to the brink of defaulting on our national debt. 
   

• Far-right House Republicans aren’t satisfied with the $1.59 trillion in discretionary spending cuts for the 2024 fiscal year McCarthy and President Biden already agreed to the last McCarthy tried to mug Democrats. The GOP yokels in the lower chamber are demanding another $120 billion in cuts, plus “tougher legislation” to stop the flow of immigrants at the U.S. southern border. Even many Republicans in the Senate have rejected the House GOP’s attempt to make border control central to the government shutdown fight. 
   

As of Thursday, the government began notifying federal workers that a shutdown appears imminent, meaning that millions of employees—including military service members—may stop receiving pay soon. It took Kevin McCarthy over a dozen votes to become Speaker, and just nine months later, he has allowed his far-right flank to push us to a likely government shutdown. Great party! No notes!

Chaos reigned in the second GOP presidential debate last night. Missed our Friends of the Pod Group Thread? Luckily for you, Jon Lovett will be doing an AMA on Discord tomorrow, 9/29 at 4pm PST. Friends of the Pod subscribers get access to exclusive events like last night’s Group Thread, Ads-free Pod Save America episodes AND hours of bonus content featuring your favorite Crooked hosts and staff. Head to crooked.com/friends to learn more today.

Post-pandemic economic recovery, like all other aspects of American prosperity, has not been evenly distributed. New York City has nearly recovered all of the jobs it lost during the pandemic, but Manhattan now has the widest income gap of any large county in the country. New York is already known for the richest rich living just blocks from the poorest poor, but the divide is only becoming more striking. The wealthiest 20 percent of Manhattan residents have an average household income of $545,549, which is 53 times as much as the average income of the bottom 20 percent. Fifty. Three. Times. It’s an income gap larger than ones in many developing countries.

Across the city, wages are up, but mostly for the already affluent. The jobs that are returning are mostly low-paying. Unemployment is down overall, but continues to be dramatically higher for Black and Hispanic New Yorkers. James Parrott, the director of economic and fiscal policy at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School said “we’re still much worse off than we were in 2019.” Middle-income New Yorkers are similarly hurting more since the pandemic, as well, because of stagnant wage growth and the hampered recovery of major industries like retail. From 2019-2022, the median household income in New York dropped a staggering 7 percent. Low-wage workers who made an average of  $40,000 per year saw their salary increase by just $146 annually between 2019-2022. Highly-paid earners saw 27 times more in annual salary increases during the same period.

A New York appellate court rejected disgraced former president Donald Trump’s attempt to delay his civil fraud trial, which will begin on Monday. 
 

Moving on to a different Trump legal case, federal prosecutors filed a motion on Thursday accusing the former president’s lawyers of trying to use an arcane law to “intentionally derail” the timing of his trial regarding his strategic mishandling of classified documents and the resulting obstruction of efforts to collect them. The prosecutors also allege that Trump stole “nine documents that were so sensitive they were not allowed to be stored in [a secure facility] in Florida and would be made available to Mr. Trump’s lawyers only in Washington.” Well okay then!
 

Moving on to yet another Trump legal case, the former president announced that he will not seek to move the criminal racketeering case against him in Fulton County, GA, to federal court. 

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) claims he is being persecuted over his ethnicity (We think it’s the corruption and gold bars). On Tuesday, the highest-ranking Latino leader in Congress Rep. Peter Aguilar (D-CA) called for him to resign. 

New weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic are under scrutiny over reports that they’re correlated with suicidal ideation among patients. 

We all enjoyed watching former U.N. Secretary Nikki Haley skewer Vivek Ramaswamy on the GOP debate stage. Unfortunately, she gave him a glowing blurb in his 2022 book. 

Michael Gambon, who played Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbeldore in the Harry Potter films has died at 82.

A new book by former Washington Post editor Marty Baron reveals that former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner allegedly tried to persuade the Post’s publisher to fire Barton over the paper’s coverage of the Russia investigation. The Post and the New York Times shared a Pulitzer prize for their coverage of the investigation of Russian election interference in 2016 and links between the former president and the Kremlin. When former FBI Director and Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not indict Trump in the spring of 2019 (but still provided ample evidence of Trump’s potential obstruction of justice and was able to secure multiple indictments and convictions of Trump’s cronies) Kushner told his contact at the paper that the Post should issue a public apology, and that there should be a “reckoning of some sort.” The Post did not apologize, and Baron was not fired. He retired in 2021.

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Reno, NV, was named the happiest place to live in the country according to Outside Magazine. The unhappiest place in the country? Wherever Ted Cruz is. 

A New York judge ruled on Thursday that NYC regulators could move forward with a minimum-wage increase for app-based food-delivery workers.